In this Sunday’s post we’re looking at the Burson Fun and Bang units. Part of the new Burson product line.
Disclaimer: This is a Picture Sunday post where we take a quick preview of various gear before their full review. You can take a look at our other Picture Sunday posts HERE. Burson Fun and Bang serve three amplification purposes: headphones, pre-amp, and loudspeakers. For more about Burson’s BFP series, check below:
Burson Bang
Burson Fun
Burson Play
Typically it takes a Doom Guy to wield a BFG. BFP, or Bang, Fun, Play, doesn’t exactly require muscles. Bang, with its 40W (4ohm load), op-amp rolling, small footprint, and amazing warranty, is a bang-on as regards power, as regards circuitry, as regards hiding under a TV stand, and more. It’s the same size as Fun and Play and works great with their precise pre-amps. Even bounded together with cables and power supplies, they are no problem in a stack or a John Woo wield for a small teenager.
Each can be used discretely with your other gear, or Legoed into a single tower to do all your integrated DAC/Headphone stuff, most of your DAC stuff, and as long as your house isn’t the size of a tennis court, most of your power amp stuff.
My home (118 metres squared) is too small to contain Bang’s power. Years ago I had a pair of cheap but large Tandy speakers powered by a Class-D 25W Sharp Auvi system pump the auditorium of a converted warehouse pretty well. It was trip hop and the bass kept pumping. The speakers were 8ohm.
Theoretically, Bang might do that and more. Of course, the warehouse had the added advantage of crazy echo and reflection. As I said before, Fun and/or Play can be coupled to Bang, which really is an advantage for Burson because, in that configuration Bang can work for headphone dorks looking to move up to speakers, or speaker dorks move down to headphones. And it is a far, far better amp for bookshelf speakers than most bookshelf systems. And it aims above that with enough power for 8ohm and 16ohm speakers for you living room.
As you know, Play packs a punch, with the proviso that background noise is above average for sensitive earphones, and Fun is much the same, minus the DAC. Right now, Play is disassembled, getting a de-dust and being op-rolling again, so it’s not in this photo. Honestly, I’m not totally taken with the series’s looks, but I am with its power, with its skillful handling of various loads and outputs, it’s kind of a killer buy.
In the next thirty days I’ll be putting Fun to the pen and hooking it and Play and Bang together to suss how best to make use of the stack and of its discrete components. Honestly, I reckon I’ll fail at both, but in failing hope to deliver an honest appraisal of one of the most interesting mid-budget systems out there.
