Burmester 218

As much as I tinkered with a little crystal radio as a child and started reading stereo magazines in high school, it wasn't until my early 30s that I half-stumbled into the higher end of the hi-fi sphere.

POWER AMPLIFIER

As I progressed from used Advents to used Spicas and began to experiment with speaker cables, more and more names of high-end brands entered my consciousness. Burmester (founded in 1977), and some of the other higher-priced components from overseas whose looks seemed commensurate with their prices, held an outsized fascination for me. What about them, other than their visual appearance, accounted for their vaunted reputations and cost?

Somewhere in my 50s, I learned the difference in sound quality between Adcom and early Krell the hard way. It didn't take golden ears to detect the difference; I rued empty pockets each time I heard the Adcom's highs. But, without listening experience, the unique qualities of Burmester and other non-US brands continued to elude me.

Jump ahead to 2022, when the Burmester Musiccenter 151 MK2 streaming D/A preamplifier ($27,500) arrived here for review.' As much as I appreciated its qualities, I always suspected that this "little brother" to the since-replaced Reference Line 111 Musiccenter supplied only a taste of the sound Burmester's engineers could deliver in their top Reference and Signature lines. When Jim Austin reviewed the Top Line 216 amplifier as monoblocks in 2023, in very positive terms,² I became even more intrigued.

Enter the Reference Line Burmester 218 ($50,000 each), a stereo amplifier that weighs almost 93lb and is bridgeable to work as a monoblock. In mono configuration ($100,000 for a stereo pair), the 218 outputs up to 565W into 8 ohms or 785W into 4 (rated, apparently, at 1% THD+N). In the Burmester line, the 218 is bested in power (and presumably quality) only by the far larger, far heavier Signature Line Burmester 159, a 373lb behemoth that is specified to output a mammoth 1200W into 4 ohms.