Date: 2025-02-05
The Burmester BC150 Loudspeaker: Big. Expensive. Simple concept. Complex execution. What I want to address is whether it lives up to the billing that might make you expect?
I recently had the opportunity to do extensive listening with this speaker, together with a full Burmester preamp/amp stack. I was somewhat surprised by what I found, but frankly, it is best to go into these listening sessions with something as close to “empty mind” as you can, else you find yourself simply searching for data that ratifies your preconceptions.
The BC 150 is a big speaker, but not the biggest in the price class. I’ll use the Magico M6 and Wilson Alexx V for comparison purposes here. The BC150 is a little under five feet tall, at 56 inches, and quite deep, around 24 inches. It’s 12” wide. So it’s a big-ish speaker that crosses the scales at 400 pounds each. The Magico is similar in size and weight, though a bit wider. The Alexx V is 8” taller than the BC150 and has a slightly bigger footprint. The Wilson’s weigh 500 lb. per side. These are large speakers, but surprisingly similar in size. In my experience, these speakers like a large room, but a large room defined in pretty conventional residential terms. Something like 4000-5000 cubic feet. Which is to say, speakers in this price class hit a kind of sweet spot of extreme tech and usability.
When you look at the BC150s, you can see they are very carefully styled speakers. It does have a different aesthetic from the competition, more “modern furnishings” and less “techno-pod”. That may be good or bad, depending on your taste, but I can imagine listeners who would want this look. Burmester offers some limited customization of the finishes as well.
Structurally, there’s an extruded aluminum casing around the front, top, and rear. The fins on the side are actually the grille cloth for the woofer (inside face) and the vent for the woofer (outside face). The entire cabinet is lined internally with plastic coated 4mm steel. Magico uses carbon fiber with extensive bracing; Wilson uses their V material with bracing, and Burmester uses braced steel. The structural integrity of this class of speaker is pretty far removed from the wood-based systems many of us are used to.
The BC150 is a reflex design, a three-plus-way speaker. It has a 12-inch woofer, a 7” mid-range driver, and an air motion transformer tweeter. There is also an air motion transformer tweeter on the rear for a certain amount of ambiance (hence 3-plus-way).
So, what’s unusual about this? Well, that’s the thing. It’s like a lot of Burmester stuff: other than the scale of the cabinet and components, it’s kind of hard to pin it down until you start to think about how much effort went into figuring out how to construct something like this. Talking to the engineers, this is a speaker where many details were very carefully considered. But that’s true for a lot of high-end audio. Since it is always hard to reason from the features of the speaker to the sound, we want to be really careful with that, and Burmester gives us little temptation to head there. We have to listen.
Perhaps the only feature that is slightly unusual, and I found to be beneficial, is that there is a control for the ambiance tweeter, so you can turn it all the way off or you can turn it up to, I assume, approximately equal level to the front tweeter. That allows you to dial in the speaker a little bit to your listening room.
Now, let’s talk about sound quality because that’s really the story here.
I thought the Burmester BC150 was quite special. Now I come from the camp that says Wilson’s and Magico’s sound special too, and so I want to be clear that the Burmester is in that same group, but you still get to pick your rendition of special. The gradations here can seem small. For example, my reference speaker right now is the Magico A5, a $28,000 speaker. They sound very good, and they do some exceptional things. I think they’re wonderful speakers. You could make the argument that going up from there, or up from any point in the price curve, you get diminishing marginal returns. There’s a long history of arguing about that. What such discussions miss, I think, is that as you get into the category of the BC150 and M6 and Alexx V, to my mind you cross into a realm where for the first time a large percentage of the distortions that make you realize you are listening to recorded music are vanquished. The specialness here isn’t that the BC150 will go deeper or louder or play more dynamically, necessarily, but that the distractions of recorded stereo, on good recordings, get to some minimal level where it is easy to forget them. That threshold probably varies from listener to listener, but I will say the Burmester BC150, to me, sounds exceptional in this sense. They do a very good job of disappearing.
Since the reference speakers do this disappearing act to a degree as well, why is the BC150 the one you might pick if you were shopping in this price range? The thing about the BC150, to me, is that it pulls off a set of sonic contrasts that ordinarily form a trade- off. Let me give you an example. The BC150 pulls off the interesting contrast of sounding powerful and delicate. If you think about it, that’s actually something that’s present in real music, and I thought that quality was super endearing and very desirable. It also pulls off the contrast of being thunderous yet detailed. Often, when it comes to bass, you tend to get the depth and power but give up some detail in the mid and upper bass range. With this speaker, that’s not the case. You get deep and detailed bass, which is a hard combination to pull off. It also sounds big and open…and intimate.
It’s this set of contrasts of being dynamic and poetic that makes it exceptional. It’s what many people want because some music wants to be led by poetry and some music wants to be led by dynamism. There’s some music where the two things come together and are interwoven by the composer or songwriter, and I found that ability to pull off these contrasts to be really wonderful. It makes you think that the speaker isn’t really getting in the way; it’s giving you the music as it was recorded.
That isn’t in the sense that the BC150 is an audio microscope or something.. There are times when the BC150 feels like it’s in the circuit, but it’s really a minor musical event when it happens. The BC150 errs, if it is an error, on the side of being relaxed rather than tense. I think that helps them disappear.
On top of that, for such big speakers, the image is largely off the box. They throw a deep and wide soundstage that strangely doesn’t distract you into thinking that the sound is coming from the speakers themselves. Some recordings have performers positioned hard left or right, and the BC150 reproduces that soundstage faithfully. It’s not doing soundstage magic but rather presenting the recording as it is. The speaker does relatively little to get in the way of the sound and is able to reveal these wonderful characteristics present in a lot of recordings.
Did I enjoy listening to the BC150? Absolutely, yes. Do I think they’re exceptional? Yes, I think they’re exceptional in their way because they’re in a price class where there are other really exceptional speakers. I could easily see someone carefully listening to the available players and concluding that the BC150 is the right answer for them. I can also imagine someone concluding that one of the other products in this price category is the right answer as well because the people making speakers at this level are really good designers. And we are in a bit of a golden era for high-end speakers where we’ve gotten beyond trying too hard to make big, expensive speakers sound big and expensive. More attention has been paid in the last 5 years to making big, expensive speakers with low distortion and a pleasing character at the margin.
Burmester BC150 Loudspeaker
3-way bass reflex loudspeaker 396 lb. each
Width: 12.2”
Depth: 23.7”
Height: 56.4”
Sensitivity: 88.5 db @ 2.83v/1 m
Nominal impedance: 3 ohms
Woofer: 12.6”
Midrange: 7.1”
Tweeter: 2x Air Motion Transformer (front/rear)
Crossover frequencies: 155 Hz, 1.800 kHz







