Reviews

The Absolute Sound magazine issue 127, Dec 2000/ Jan 2001

The Golden Ear Award - Audio HP's Workshop page 169

Burmester 808 MK V preamplifier
Wisdom Audio M-70 loudspeaker system
Nordost Valhalla interconects and speaker cables
Lyra Helicon moving-coil cartridge
Edge NL 10 solid-state amplifier

The Burmester 808 Mk V preamp is a piece of audio gear that wouldn’t look out of place in (the old) Tiffany’s or as an example of high-tech industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art. With its chrome finish and svelte and sensuously tooled look, it attains a standard of craftsmanship that puts it in the tip percentile of High End components. And it costs accordingly - $30,196, with all the modular stages our version contains, to wit, moving-coil stage, moving-magnet stage, and four high-output stages, each having individual channel-level controls. And it just celebrated a twentieth birthday, its release date being August 8, 1980 (808, European style, in keeping with Burmester’s numbering system for all of its electronics). Given the ease with which its modules can be replaced, the basic design may be good for another 20 years.

While its sonic excellence was apparent to me from the first listen, it has only been with the passage of time and the advent of the Wisdom Audio hybrid speaker that I have come to see just how singular the 808 is put up against the best of the competition, tubular or otherwise. And I say this not just of its line-stage section, but of its moving-coil section as well, which trumped the present-day competition, even the formidable Aesthetix Io.

In his Golden Ear award for Burmester’s "little brother" CD deck and digital-to-analog converter (979 CD transport and 980 DAC), Jonathan Valin notes the almost total lack of coloration these units impose on the sound of conventional 16/44 recordings. To these ears, the Burmester electronics, one and all (save for the behemoth 911 amplifiers, which are not tin the same league), are the closest to pure tonal neutrality of any components I’ve encountered in some years, these being sufficient to make me feel somewhat Jurassic. I am not sure, after my experience with the preamplifier, line and phono stages, and the "big brother" CD gear, that the Burmester units have a tonal "character" in the way we have been wont to describe such. Valin goes on to suggest that this lack of character in Burmester’s CD gear lets you hear into 16/44 digital in a way hitherto impossible and to hear its true merits in recreating a universe different from but parallel to that of analog encoding. I think this is true of all of Burnester’s front-end electronics and I think this makes them audio works of art, well worth the investment if you can swing the money.

There is no solid-state signature I can detect. It will take a better preamp to show me its flaws. The Burmester is free of grain. It has dynamics as wide as any great tubed, full-feature preamp, line or phono stage. Its neutrality is not purchased at the price of harmonic leanness. Its reproduction of massed strings is rich and sensuous, and not the least bit overblown. Its reproduction of woodwinds gives the "body" and "dimensionality" of reeds their full due. It produces an incomparably wide soundstage and can, with the right speaker system, precisely licate a full-bodies instrument or vocalist at any position on that stage, while creating the specific air about the instrument, front, side and rear. (If you don’t believe this, try the Decca/Phase Four Recording of Bernard Herrmann’s The Three Worlds of Gulliver from The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann – in which each of the many mikes covering a small instrumental grouping out of the orchestral whole seems to be throwing a pool of light down upon the space surrounding the players, while individualizing the unique harmonic signature of each instrument therein.)

On a low-coloration speaker system, like the planar magnetic hybrid Wisdoms, the Burmester 808 stands naked, as do all electronics without the old speaker colorations to disguise or camouflage their own character. And it stands there lower in character than even the Wisdoms, which do have a faintly beige coloration while creating an almost literally palpable soundstage. If you haven’t heard the Burmesters and aren’t able to imagine what I’m talking about, I refer you to the American Spectral M 360 and the Edge NL-10 amplifiers, which either approach (the Spectral) the Burmester’s purity and neutrality or, perhaps, surpass them (the Edge). As it stands, the Burmester is the solid-state preamplifier to beat.

While there is, I think, work yet to be done to the Wisdom Audio planar magnetic hybrid loudspeaker, it represents a breakthrough in the design of a low-coloration speaker system, It does several things remarkably well (and I refer you to my more extended thoughts on it in Issue 126), not the least of which is in maintaining (after set-up) a frequency response, plus or minus 1 dB, from 30 to 25,000 Hertz. It also creates the most realistic approximation of a soundstage we have encountered with any speaker; indeed, it reveals, as if without a care in the world, just how un approximate the rendering of that stage is on other speakers, even the PipeDreams (which beats it on hall ambience, but not in the realistic rendering of the stage upon which real musicians sit and play). Its resolution of the layerings, real or artificially created, in recordings is virtually peerless. And, most impressively of all, the Wisdom is, metaphorically speaking, an order of magnitude lower in overall coloration than anything we’ve heard around here. This strips the components upstream from it of a protective coloration afforded by every other speaker on the market and allows you to hear, as if written in fire, the most minute colorations of electronics, suspension systems, arms, cartridges and the like (even down to dirty connectors). And as unlikely as it might seem with a crossover from the dual-woofer system (per channel) to the planar magnetic strips at 150Hz, the interation of the two is psychoacoustically well-nigh flawless, thanks to the crafty complementary matching of colorations.

The work to be done? The brain that controls the system is needlessly complex. There ought to be a simpler way of setting it up, especially for listeners who frequently change amplifiers. As it stands, the system works best with solid-state and will have to be retuned to sparkle with big tubed units. I also believe its efficiency and low-level resolution could be further improved, and the moving mass of its planar unit reduced to allow more air and light into the upper octaves. Even so, it is of reference or "monitor" quality as it stands and I hope it points the way for other designers to make similar breakthroughs in scotching speaker "character."

Let me put this as plainly as possible. The Valhalla system from Nordost is the least colored and most neutral cabling ever to hit the marketplace. The colorations of the SPM speaker cable, that lean mid-bass and slight plateau in the upper midrange, are gone. So is a kind of low-level grit and grain in that same upper-midrange region. Contrasted with the Quattrofil and SPM, the Valhallas increase liquidity in the midrange, lend much more dimensionality to the instruments and voices of the orchestra, while retrieving even more detail, and with greater naturalness and bloom. The linearity at the frequency extremes is much improved, especially in terms of transient purity at the top of the orchestral spectrum. And wait till you hear the articulation, tautness, and authority of the bottom bass. (And its immunity from radio frequency interference, RFI, is greatly improved.) This stuff costs the proverbial Midas ton, but it’s Probably going to rank up there in the stratosphere after all of today’s competing models have been replaced several times again with newer and "improved" versions. If I had to further describe it, I’d say it represented the best of both the Edge NL-10 amp and the Burmester 808 preamp, by combining their strongest characteristics. A triumph, pure and simple. Review to come.

I wrote a long essay on the virtues of Lyra’s limited edition Evolve cartridge (Issue 123) and rued the fact that only 100 of these were being made, one for every year of the past century. (Could have had an Evolve with the serial number of the year I was born if I hadn’t been born so early in the Eighteenth Century.) Allen Perkins, Lyra’s US importer, assured me that the forthcoming Helicon would be even better. I won’t tell you how skeptical I was, so I don’t have to tell you how misplaced the skepticism. The Helicon is better at all the things the Evolve did so well, and with virtually now coloration, acing the Evolve in this respect.

The Helicon does not have the several Technicolorations of the Evolve, sounding, at first, so surprisingly neutral that you hardly know it’s in the system. But believe me, it can handle any tracking challenge, down to differentiating the individual bells (including one or two out of tune) in a bell tree (check out the aforementioned Three Worlds of Gulliver). Or a barely shaken tambourine (again, the Herrmann) or a tiny cymbal, hit at the top of a virtuoso percussion passage (John Adams’ Violin Concerto on Telarc). It’s just effortless, and unlike some of its Lyra predecessors (Evolve exempted), grainless. By comparison, my favored Clearaudios sound a bit too lean, with the slightest transient-edge "enhancement." Takes a while to break in (more than 50 hours) and until it does, its best to play several long LPs, volume down, before a session so that it won’t sound edgy. But is this thing ever gorgeous, without being "gorgeous" in the way one might usually think – full of slurpy Koetsu-like colorations or "high-definition" punchiness like some older van den Huls. Review to come.

I was having a time deciding whether to go with the Gamut amplifier or the Edge and had just about decided to split an ear between the two when Jonathan Valin beat me to the punch on the Gamut, which I consider to be not only a best buy but, exceptions to be noted, possessed of the most completely realized musicality of any solid-state amp in my experience. Sweet and seductive in that nearly ineffable way the real thing is. But in my view, possessed of an inadequate power supply that robs it of being completely authoritative at the bottom end of the spectrum or able to encompass, with comfort, the highest level passages played back through the kinds of speakers you’re most likely to find in home use today. Push it, and it begins to sound grainy and a little clouded. Keep it below the ultimate concert-hall levels or use it with a highly efficient speaker, and you’ll have a foretaste of paradise.

So, toward the last issue’s deadline, along comes, from Colorado (the new hot spot for audio designers) the Edge NL-10 amplifier, which I hugely admired – at normal playback levels – but found altogether too intense at high volumes, intense in the sense of approaching a kind of white-steel hardness.

Then, lo and behold, what happens? The manufacturer calls up, tells us he’s found a defective relay in one production run – a run that included our sample – and tells Scot Markwell how to fix the problem. In a trice, current limiting gone and, in its place, not only a sense of effortless power at high volumes, but a kind of liquidity, audible through the tonal neutrality, that cannot be attributed to slow transient response (quite the opposite, I’d argue) or phase shift, but rather one that can only be achieved by a super-fast rise time.

The Edge NL-10 is, in terms of absence of overt artifacts, as tonally neutral as the Burmester front-end electronics. Its dynamic range exceeds that of the general run of solid-state designs and does them one better by approaching the dynamic contrasts that the tube juggernauts can so easily encompass. Furthermore, its low-level resolution is stunning. Because of a total lack of grain or noise artifacts, not to mention its in herently quite low distortion, you feel as if you can hear more deeply into the soundfield, indeed, back to the back wall, even during highly complex and dynamic orchestral tuttis, which is what I suppose transparency is all about. Add to this, the "X" factor – the liquid-like quality throughout the middle frequencies, which somehow seems to be the amplifier resolving the sound of the ambient air itself, and you’ve got something stunning to behear. Review to come.