Now, for its part, the Tivoli…
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The beguilingly named model 15-2163 ($23.99 in the Shack's current catalog) is designed to be installed on a rooftop or chimney, but having it in an attic is almost as good. In fact, to someone like me, who's pathologically afraid of heights, having it in the attic is vastly better. I lifted the antenna into the space above my listening room, carefully unfolded it, and cobbled together a mounting arrangement that allowed all six elements to function more or less unimpeded, with enough access that I can manually change its direction whenever I feel like it.
Sometimes it all comes down to the shape of the side panels. I was smitten by the gentle curves of the Burmester B99 loudspeaker's aluminum side grilles, which have uncommon grace. A love affair with an enclosure? Well, yes. After all, beauty is an intensely personal matter. In the words of Burmester's motto: "Art for the ear."
The B99's shape is slightly reminiscent of an airfoil and with an aluminum veneer modeled on the riveted wings of turboprop aircraft. It is a three-way, full-range, floorstanding loudspeaker whose midrange and high-frequency drivers are installed in a D'Appolito…
The B99 comes in three standard finishes: elsberry/aluminum laminate, maple/aluminum, and silver/aluminum. The veneer panels can be changed, thus making it possible to alter the enclosure's color. The fit'n'finish of the cabinetry, hardware, and drivers is superb—as you should expect of a speaker costing $47,000/pair.
Setup
The pair of Burmester B99s, enclosed in their 6'-high cardboard and foam shipping cartons, arrived at my house by rental van. Udo Besser, then Burmester's marketing manager, was there to help me unload, move, and set them up for the review. He immediately…
Bells, chimes, and triangles shimmered with cascades of clearly defined harmonics. Don Dorsey's "Ascent," from Telarc's Time Warp, played with a mixture of dense bass pulses and chimes that were sweet, translucent, and clean. The leading edges of transients were razor-sharp without being irritating. Dorsey's synthesizer exploded out of black silence with a stream of pulses, beeps, bell-like sounds, and high-pitched squeaks that moved back and forth across the soundstage. The piece's end—an explosive shot followed immediately by sullen, massive rumbling—was full of angst and foreboding.
…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, floorstanding, reflex-loaded loudspeaker with double-walled enclosure, milled and enameled aluminum front panel. Drive-units: 5" by 1" ribbon tweeter, two 5.5" (140mm) magnesium-cone midrange units, two 9.5" (245mm) paper-cone woofers. Crossover frequencies: 180Hz, 1.8kHz. Crossover filters: second-order Linkwitz-Riley. Frequency response: 32Hz-28kHz, ±3dB. Power rating: 400W. Impedance: 4 ohms nominal, 3 ohms minimum. Sensitivity: 90dB/W(2.83V)/m.
Dimensions: 58.3" (1495mm) H by 12.1" (310mm) W by 24.2" (620mm) D. Weight: 220 lbs (…
Sidebar 2: Dieter Burmester chats with Larry Greenhill
Larry Greenhill: When did you start building audio products?
Dieter Burmester: I have been an audiophile and musician since age 14. I played guitar in clubs every weekend and later studied electronics at the university. After my education, I went into business making electronic sensors for medical diagnostic systems that ran automated blood tests. I owned Quad electrostatics driven by a Quad 22 amplifier. The amplifiers broke often because the tubes didn't last.
I decided to build my own amplifier in 1977, using the…
Sidebar 3: Associated Equipment
Analog source: Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo power supply and Ittok tonearm, Spectral moving-coil cartridge.
Digital sources: Krell KRC-28 CD transport, Sony SCD-C555ES multichannel SACD player.
FM tuners: Day-Sequerra FM Reference Classic, Rotel RH-10, Magnum Dynalab MD-102 with 205 Sleuth RF amplifier, Fanfare FT-1A.
Preamplifiers: Krell KCT, Sony TA-P9000ES, Mark Levinson ML 7A with L-2 phono section, Conrad-Johnson Premier 18LS, Margulis and Duntech MX 10 MC phono preamplifiers.
Power amplifiers: Mark Levinson No.334, Krell FPB 600C…
Sidebar 4: Measurements
Stereophile's reviewers seem to be currently enamored of large, heavy loudspeakers. As with the 270-lb B&W Signature 800 that Kalman Rubinson reviews elsewhere in this issue, it was not possible for me to lift the 220-lb Burmester B99 off the ground for the acoustic measurements. As a result, there was an unavoidable "floor bounce" of the speaker's output that contributed some visible roughness to some of the frequency-response graphs.
I must also comment on the "thinking out of the box" that led Burmester to place the terminals in a recess on the…
The B99's dispersion in the vertical plane (fig.5) features a sharp notch at the upper crossover frequency for standing listeners, but the response doesn't change significantly as long as the speaker is auditioned on an axis between the centers of the two midrange units. (Ignore the smooth rise above 15kHz in the second trace from the bottom, which I believe is due to an averaging error when I took the measurement: I measure outdoors, and minuscule differences in path length due to slight breezes can lead to such errors.) At extreme off-axis vertical angles, the ribbon's output is well-…
Everyone knows the story: Isaac Newton got hit on the head by an apple and suddenly discovered the physics of gravitation. Like the one about Archimedes discovering the basics of hydrostatics while taking a bath, this story turns up everywhere. Even Michael Stipe, in R.E.M.'s "Man in the Moon," sings "Newton got beaned by the apple good."
Trouble is, these stories are all wrong. Now, there are few things uglier than an academic who complains that the general population knows little about this or that esoteric subject, so I'll complain only once: I would love it if the world cared as much…