Burmester BC150 Exclusive First Look

The crossover too, shows just how seriously Burmester is taking things with the BC150. The board is large, populated with the highest grade components (many of which are ‘potted’… more on that later) and then sits on its own suspension system within its own chamber inside the loudspeaker. Short of playing the loudspeaker during an earthquake, nothing’s going to trouble that crossover. Furthermore, because it’s going to have to handle some high power, everything is built to last. Perhaps the adjustment for the rear-firing tweeter highlights this best; rather than a simple potentiometer mounted in the rear of the loudspeaker, Burmester went the extra mile and built its own stepped attenuator. No one else does this!

Those aforementioned potted capacitors are a part of Burmester going the extra mile once more, in that the BC150 is one of the few passive loudspeakers to achieve UL certification. This means every aspect of the loudspeaker needs to be tested for fire safety, and usually applies to electronic components. Granted, if you are sufficiently infernoed to be concerned about the potential for loudspeaker terminals or internal capacitors in a crossover network to either catch fire or release toxic fumes, it’s probably already a bit late, but the fact Burmester even considered going the distance on this is impressive in its own right.

One of the things you should get from all this is that the engineers in Burmester are driven by passion, and it’s a passion that is shared by the people who end up buying the loudspeakers and enjoying them. OK, few engineers are unmotivated by their own projects, but to create a project like this, you need engineers who will spend hours on end talking about the design of the BC150’s feet, and how many iterations they went through to create the right dial-in adjustable foot sitting on its own bearings. They’ll even tell you about the creation of the tool used to adjust that foot with the kind of bright-eyed enthusiasm you might use to describe your child’s first day at school.

Of course, all that passion and obsessiveness is as nothing if the loudspeaker itself does not perform in the listening room. However, that attention to detail pays off as the BC150 is one of the most detailed, exciting, dynamic and transparent sounding loudspeakers you can hear. There’s also a distinct family sound emerging that follows in these lines, from the B38 up to the vast BC350, they have a lot in common; just that the further up the line you go, the more dynamic range, volume headroom and detail from a cabinet that does an increasingly impressive vanishing act. Granted, a loudspeaker like the BC150 needs a lot of quality electronics upstream, but that’s something Burmester already knows well, and having these loudspeakers driven by a pair of 911 mk3 power amps running in bridged mono mode is a perfect way of delivering a truly outstanding performance.

As discussed earlier, we are keeping at least a little bit of our powder dry for our upcoming 200^th Issue, but the sound of the BC150 is extremely impressive. For such an imposing loudspeaker, it’s remarkably fast and musically reactive; transients hit home with speed and precision, making many ‘boxes’ sound like, well, boxes. These loudspeakers are too substantial to be a point source loudspeaker (unless you were playing them in a room about the size of Berlin itself), but the speed of the BC150 suggests otherwise; One of my regular recordings is ‘Memphis Soul Stew’ by King Curtis [King Curtis Live at Fillmore West, ATCO], not just because it’s an unsullied live mix taken almost directly off a desk a few days before King Curtis’ murder, but because each musician in the group is a master in their own art. I mean, every other drummer tries – and usually fails – to deliver a Purdie Shuffle, but when you have Bernard Perdie himself playing that shuffle, it’s like a lesson in the craft. Similarly, getting to hear Cornell Dupree play that funky rhythm guitar sound with licks he invented, and so on… you couldn’t ask for a better lesson. Any speaker that can keep up with these musicians is impressive in the extreme.

The vanishingly low cabinet coloration not only acts to keep the BC150 fast, it keeps it extremely detailed too. This is a loudspeaker that throws the window wide open on your music. Pick an instrument, preferably a solo instrument on a well-recorded album; that instrument sounds detailed, articulate, and physically ‘there’ in the room, solidly placed within a wide soundstage that projects slightly into the room, but not so much as to be intrusive. It’s detailed and precise enough that colorations are more likely to be to do with the room than the speaker, and many of those are ‘nailed’ thanks to the rear-firing tweeter. The BC150 loudspeaker is an audio reproduction instrument of high-precision, and as such if your room has a bit of a mid-range hump, you’ll notice it more immediately here. Given the BC150 and the company it keeps, that’s no bad thing, as room acoustics should be a strong consideration at this level. But, regardless, listening to something like ‘Love in Vain’, by the Rolling Stones [Stripped, Polydor] and you get to hear Jagger’s voice unsullied by the speaker itself; other speakers seem to play something more like an impression of Mick Jagger by way of comparison.

Then there’s the bass. Lung-emptying, bowel-clearing, demolition-grade bass that you can feel at the back of your eyes. Given some heavy-set amplifiers feeding the BC150, the likelihood is either you or the room give up long before the loudspeakers have hit their end-stops. I routinely use ‘Chameleon’ by Trentemøller [The Last Resort, Poker Flat] because its fast, deep, near-square wave synth bass is a torture test of ported loudspeakers. Here, however, the depth and intensity of that bass is enough to reflect the torture back on the listener… there are big, nasty things lurking in that recording, and the BC150 isn’t afraid of letting them out to play.

Perhaps most importantly though, that bass is like the rest of the frequency range; very well integrated. Everything hangs together well in the BC150, almost in the way a simple but well-made two-way loudspeaker can. The engineering that makes that effortless integration is extremely hard to do, and even some of the big names in high-end sometimes struggle with a sound that is more individuated ‘bass-midrange-treble’ than an integrated, musical performance.

I’m mindful here that this could sound like an ‘all detail, no fun’ loudspeaker. There are some high-end loudspeaker designs that make music a sterile, if detailed, event. There are others that go for the sense of occasion, at the expense of transparency, clarity and detail. Few manage to have feet in both camps, and the BC150 is one of those rare exceptions that are both musically communicative and musically analytical at the same time. That’s a heady mix, but might require some sensory readjustment on the part of the listener; we are used to having to make a choice in this trade-off, and the first time you get to experience both the detail and the musical intention that underpins that detail, it can be a daunting experience. Don’t be surprised if that doubles your listening energies at first, but you soon get past this and will find the sound just beguiling and inviting you to play further.