Pre/Power Amplifiers

As a company so rooted in the vision of one man, founder Dieter Burmester, it's pleasing to see the brand still flourishing after his sudden passing in 2015, at the age of just 69. But then the company's origin story is a familiar one, albeit with a solid musical twist: by the age of 15, Burmester was playing electric bass in bands, a passion he would follow for his entire life, and working on ways of improving the valve amp he'd built for his instrument. Scroll forward 15 years, and Burmester, by now a qualified radio and TV technician, with a degree in electrical engineering, founded the company that bore his name, moving on from valve amps to solid-state designs.

Just 20 examples of his first amplifier were produced, carrying the company name in what he later discovered was a near-perfect facsimile of his father's handwriting. By 1983 he was making his first balanced power amplifier, followed four years later with an innovative upsampling CD player, and then a belt-drive transport carried through to Burmester's players of today. Speakers followed, using AMT tweeters, as part of a 'whole system' philosophy, and in 2002 he branched out into automotive audio systems... via the Bugatti Veyron 16.4! Burmester was also an early adopter of computer-stored music, its first 'music centres' able to rip CDs to internal storage, as well as handling Internet radio and other streaming services, arriving more than a decade ago [HFN Dec '12].

In 2015 the company passed to Dieter's widow, Marianne, who brought in former Porsche Marketing Director Andreas Henke as co-chairman in 2017. To this day the company remains 100% family owned, while the development, engineering and hand-assembly of its products are still carried out in Berlin – where it all started – under the watchful eye of Chief Technical Officer and head of audio design Stefan Grösler, who worked for many years alongside Dieter Burmester on many classic projects.