what hifi is a joke , any high end gear always gets 5stars
A mega-expensive antique.
For the 069's the score of "5 stars" is still tight and after listened the top level dac and sources of any brand, the 069's is to be considered one of the few worldwide absolute references!!
p.s.: In such What HiFi review is mentioned the 069's is far superior than the mighty three-box £33,000 dCS Scarlatti combo that I've had in my listening room and compared side by side with Burmester 069.
Hi LL21,
thanks for your post.
About What Hi-Fi they titled the review as "Burmester 069: The best CD player money can buy? Quite possibly, we haven’t heard anything better" and It's simply to think that the DCS Scarlatti combo was included seen that its review was performed previously than Burmester 069.
About the said comparison (together other top players from Naim, Spectral, Zanden, Cec with dac5 signature Audio Note, Metronome Kalista, Emm Labs, etc) has been made twice, one in my system that I premise is a full "Burmester Reference Line" and another one in my delear room that the system was composed by components of others top level brands. I used my musical software, both in sacd (with Burmester 069 reading the hybrid part only) and standard red book. In both situation, the listening sessions (spent a lot of hours in different days) and after the comparison the main difference, not limited to the DCS Scarlatti combo only was that with Burmester 069 the sound was astonishingly natural in all aspects and particularly in terms of naturalness, perfect and linear balance, superbly coherent, neutral timbre, richness, decay and harmonic structure, airy freedom between frequencies, definition, transient speed, delicacy, detail, transparency, micro and macro dynamics, dynamic contrast, resolution, large soundstage and very precise with pinpoint image focus. The background was absolutely noiseless and the music details come out easily and clearly with any strenght. Very impressive the truth to life bodies of the instruments and the presence of the recording studio reached an highest possible state. My system with 069's was able to draw me into the music with effortless and a natural warmth and weight, significantly more convincing and more alive, more musically with a greater presence, colour, texture and shape. With DCS Scarlatti combo and others competitors above mentioned the sound was sonically fantastic too, amazingly accurate and fast in the transients and even each one had own musical properties at the end I didn't feel totally satisfied about the way of their overall completeness sound expression, looks like that music was a little thin and boring after some hours of listenings.
Thanks...would be curious to know what happens when you shoot-out with the Vivaldi which I do prefer to the Scarlatti, or at least it seems easier to plunk down on an equipment rack and work beautifully. I have heard the Scarlatti sound beautiful, but it was exceptionally well setup with Halcyonics active isolation, literally tweaked with the voltage going into it, etc...
What Hifi is a total joke of a magazine
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