Burson Audio Playmate 3 Review

Price

The Playmate 3 is available in the UK for £850. As I shall cover, there are addendums to this figure but the basic package starts here. Burson has a new UK distributor which should help to improve the number of retailers it is sold through.

In the USA, the Playmate 3 is currently available for $599 which seems extremely keen and it’s hard to work out if this is permanent pricing.  Thanks to being an Australian company, the Playmate 3 is also a relatively reasonable $891 AUD in its home market.

Design

• Solid Metal casework is designed to help with heat dissipation
• Small display and menu driven interface
• Remote is a cost option
• External block type PSU

When you first clap eyes on the Playmate 3, you quickly become aware it is the result makes some very definite design choices that you’re either going to rather like or be left cold by.

The casework is metal and is designed around requirements that are somewhat specific to how the Playmate 3 works. It has to offer good heat dissipation because the guts of the Playmate 3 run very warm and it also (for reasons I’ll come to) has to be fairly straightforward to take the lid off and get to the internals. It does well at both of these things and I rather like the effect that the Burson gives when sat on a rack.

Information and adjustments are shown on a small display. Now, when I say ‘small’ I mean it. You’ll need some serious visual acumen to see it from a distance and making adjustments in the menu can be an infuriating and fiddly business. Don’t go thinking you can do that via a remote either as one is not included the asking price and is a £45 option.

The relatively compact size of the Playmate 3’s chassis also needs to be judged against the need for an external block type PSU to supply the 24v it actually runs on. This isn’t huge (and there are other options we’ll cover as well) and can be some distance from the main unit but you’ll still need to find room for it somewhere.

The standard of build and finish is very good though. The Burson manages to be refreshingly different to most rivals thanks to the unique colour scheme and it conveys a neatly no nonsense approach that suggests most of your budget has gone on the inside rather than the out.  Without further ado, I need to discuss what it is that is going on in there…

Specification

• Single ESS DAC with USB and optical inputs
• Supports PCM to 768kHz and DSD512
• Choice of unbalanced RCA and headphone connections
• Upgradeable power supply and internal components

If you’re looking for anything radical in the decoding hardware of the Playmate 3, you’re going to be disappointed. The Burson uses its single ESS9039 DAC (of unspecified level) and you can send it a digital signal via a USB C and Toslink optical input. There is no coaxial option and no Bluetooth.

In terms of decoding though, the Burson is as near to the state of the art to make no difference. It can handle PCM to 768kHz and DSD to 512 which covers off pretty much everything ever recorded and should ensure that you won’t find it unable to handle anything you are likely to send it.

When it comes to how this signal is outputted though, the Burson is once again at a disadvantage. The analogue signal is made available to a pair of RCA outputs on the back and some unbalanced headphone sockets on the front; one 3.5mm and one 6.35mm.

If this sounds simple, it’s because it is. The Burson does comfortably less than rival designs from Topping and iFi which cost less than half as much. If you have headphones that do their best work via a balanced connection, this is not going to be the device for you.

So, what’s this unique twist, I’ve been banging on about since the start? Actually, there are two and they’re linked.

First up, the circuit that the Burson uses is class A biased. This is not unusual in itself, plenty of devices that are not seeking to generate monster outputs are class A but the Burson operates at a 30W idling bias, delivering 3 watts per channel which is very potent for a headphone amp and should it allow to drive pretty much anything.

You can also alter this performance. You can buy upgraded op amps from Burson themselves to fit yourself and beef up performance still further (this is why the casework needs to be accessible).

This is combined with a choice of higher specification power supplies; an external unit they call the Supercharger and; if you want to go all in, there is the option of the Fusion Core GaN transitor based PSU which according to Burson effectively eliminates noise entirely. This is a very significant proportion of the total cost of the Playmate 3 so it won’t be everyone’s go to choice but it’s an option that exists nonetheless.

This is the argument that Burson Audio makes for all of their products. The Playmate 3 is designed to laugh off even the most insensitive headphones and offer performance that is beyond simple ‘put the best chip(s) you can in the box approach’. Buying the Playmate 3 also isn’t the end of the process; the basic design is able to stretch with you.

Performance

• Enormously powerful
• Tonally excellent and hard hitting
• Superb refinement and control
• Enough excitement to be fun when the music needs it

When I was banging on about the Burson being a class A device and having a 30W idling bias, it’s perfectly possible your eyes glazed over slightly and you briefly considered what you might have for dinner. The nuts and bolts of what this matters is because it means that the Playmate 3 has enormous reserves of power.

For test work, I use a pair of Focal Clear MG headphones. These aren’t that hard to drive (which means I can use them with a variety of test devices), so the true levels of headroom available from the Burson will have to go unrecorded but during testing, my comfortable listening level with the Clear MG was achieved on volume level 13 to 15 out of a possible 99 in the low gain setting (there is a high gain one with more power available too). Unless you’ve got headphones made out of concrete, the Playmate 3 will drive them.

It’ll sound genuinely outstanding while it does so too. The single most important thing that the Playmate 3 does (and does very quickly) is that you start to listen through it rather than to it.

There is little to no sense of processing or indeed anything mechanical going on with the sound which means that the distinctive electro jazz of Skalpel’s Transit is something that becomes immersive and extremely fluent. The balance of real instruments and big beefy electronic notes is something that the Burson handles effortlessly.

Give it actual vocals and it’s no less assured. Amy Millan and Torquil Cambell’s hearfelt duet in Losing to You on Stars’ There is no Love in Fluorescent Light is a proper ‘hairs on the back of the neck’ experience.

The bass extension is also hugely impressive. Out and out impact is something that even affordable devices rarely struggle with but the Burson delivers its low end with a texture, detail and control that is truly notable and it does this via both the headphone outputs and the RCA connections on the rear panel. I used a compact pair of Acoustic Energy AE1 40^th Anniversary standmounts for testing and the Burson extracted a small but meaningful amount of extra heft from these diminutive speakers.

I’m not done there either. You can stop playing decently recorded music and give the Burson the CD rip of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned by the Prodigy (an album that has the dynamic range and mastering of the telemetry from an interplanetary probe), and the Playmate 3 will deliver the crunching intensity of the tracks while just fractionally softening their harshness. It keeps material that some rival devices will tear to shreds sounding decent.

It does this while ensuring that the album itself is still a hoot to listen to. Hot Ride tears along with the fury and intensity that it always has and the Burson will latch on to and deliver any time signature you like with agility and assurance. Any gentle softening to rough recordings has not come at the expense of excitement.

Should you buy it?