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That said you must know that this is not a very selective sound. It’s quite resolved but not selective. The sound appears in larger areas rather than as clear focused contours. This is why the 3D shapes of images are merely suggested—and that's mostly due to their energy—but not actually shown. Even though this was not about the ideal sound (if something like this exists at all), I liked this player very much. It had a clearly voiced sound where one must ascertain whether this heavy presentation built upon a mighty if not completely controlled bottom end will suit a given system. If that system is already exhibiting those traits you’ll end up with too much bass. The result will be unnatural. If the system is well balanced or even a bit 'thin' on the bottom however, the 089 will fit in perfectly. And the construction is simply fantastic. So this is a truly luxurious player in terms of sound and construction not to mention price.


Description. This is a compact disc player combined with a preamplifier stage and digital inputs. It’s a top loader with a manually operated heavy cover. The disc gets placed on a metal axle and clamped to it with a wide aluminium puck. The chassis is assembled from thick aluminium panels while the front is thickly chromed brass characteristic for Burmester.


Front and back.
The mirror-finished front has a big display window with metal buttons below it to operate the drive. On the right there is a nice power switch with standby mode and a few LEDs to indicate operating mode. The green dot-matrix display is quite big and shows track number, elapsed time and—if we use that capability—volume level. Small LEDs in the display show the 24/2192 upsampler mode and synchronization of the receiver with incoming digital signal which also works when we place a disc in the transport.

On the back there are analog RCA/XLR inputs and outputs and an unbalanced ‘tape’ out. While the sockets are gold plated, the RCAs themselves are mediocre and in addition placed too close together. This eliminates high-quality cables like Acrolink. This can be explained by the fact that all Burmester devices are balanced which treats the RCA outputs as secondary. Similar sockets were used for analog and digital. To the side there are USB and RS232 sockets with small LEDs for communication within a Burmester system; and trigger sockets. Completely on the side we have the IEC power inlet with a mechanical power switch. It is worth noting that the balanced sockets are cabled differently than the DIN norm, i.e. according to the so-called American standard now used almost exclusively in Japan (Accuphase and Luxman) where the hot pin is # 3. Using a complete Burmester system we do not have to worry but connecting the player to a different system it is worth to check whether the change of absolute phase will influence the sound.



Inside
The central feature of the player is expectedly its unique drive. As I’d assumed from the outside, the main bearing together with the molded metal frame on which it is suspended comes from the top Philips CD-PRO2 drive. Usually its PCB with the controller logic, servo, decoder etc. is mounted directly beneath it. Here the motor axle sports a wheel for the belt so the PCB had to be washer-mounted elsewhere. Burmester wrote the servo program in-house to adapt it to the requirements of belt drive.

To the side we see a big solid motor with a belt transferring the torque to the drive axle. This motor is thus placed at a distance but not rigidly. It’s decoupled on flexible washers similar to turntables. This part of the player is enclosed by a very solid sub-chassis made from black-anodized aluminium to completely isolate it from the surrounding electronics.

The signal from the drive first reaches a small PCB with the DAC bolted above the main board with the output circuitry. This is part of a broader company concept based on a modular setup allowing the exchange of a given module when a new version becomes available. The same destination is of course reached by the digital inputs with their isolation transformer which appears again near the digital outputs. There is a single DAC for both channels. Unfortunately we do not know its identity as the markings have been very thoroughly erased similar to the SRC next to it, the ICs in the I/V converter and analog filter circuits. Fortunately we can identify the very nice word clock and various passive through-hole parts like precise resistors and Wima polypropylene capacitors. Volume control is performed with two chips, one per channel, whose markings were removed as well. Relays control the desired voltage. The output buffer is made from small modules called X-AMP2. Those seem reminiscent of the HDAM modules by Marantz. After unscrewing their aluminium top cover as  the heat sink for the transistors, we see that this is a surface-mounted circuit with the exception of the output transistors. On the side is the power supply. There is one toroidal power transformer with many secondary windings. We can see four rectifying bridges and lots of filtering capacitors. The stabilizing circuits are integrated. The IEC socket combines a power filter.
opinia @ highfidelity.pl
Burmester website