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Burson Soloist 3XP Review (Headphone Amp)

Rate this headphone amplifier:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 155 64.6%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 66 27.5%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther

    Votes: 5 2.1%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 14 5.8%

  • Total voters
    240

muslhead

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About as expected but I also suspect the picture gets even worse if you were to measure one of the much vaunted dac/ amp combos from the conductor range.
thats what i was thinking too.
Or even one of their more powerful amps that i was considering
 

Fotophred

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Had a pair of Burson op amps a few years ago. (Eastern Electric Minimax DAC)
At the time Iwas looking for a fuller bodied presentation to minimise then effects of a low frequency suck out a particular room suffers with.
Contacted Burson and was assured that their op amps would provide the tone signature I was seeking. -
The Burson musical reproduction was ok - nearly as good as the various sub $10 pair alternatives I had for comparison.
Even more frustrating- one failed very shortly after receiving them.
then had a horrible time getting Burson to replace the failed unit.
 

Ra1zel

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If I remember correctly the flagship Burson has noctua fan inside it. Something tells me that if your desktop device needs a fan to function it's a fail.
 

Nango

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It looks almost like a paradigm. The more a brand is respected in certain circles and the more the price is up, the harder it fails on the measurements.
Never heard an owner of this one claim about the sound quality ..... "only" mid 60dB are not audible as an issue?
 

DSJR

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whispers....
It shows that for amps to get high praise from audiophiles you really don't need low distortion amps but merely a good story and positive reviews in the 'hifi press..
Have you and others noticed how so many of the audiophile subjective favourites seem to measure badly to (almost) audible levels? the well measuring gear is dismissed because 'it all sounds the same' and often 'characterless.'

Perhaps they should let the music speak as they claim to do and not the gear which is 'altering' the sound to suit them?
 

AudioSceptic

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This is a review and detailed measurements of the Burson Soloist 3X Performance balanced headphone amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $1,200.
View attachment 209176

The overall package feels heavy and solid but I am not a fan of lack alignment of all the connectors, holes, etc. Volume control is digital but controls a Muse IC volume control. The microprocessor managing it is very fast and responsive but alas, there is no acceleration. If the volume is too loud -- which can very well be with this powerful amp -- good luck in turning it down quickly! We are talking many turns to go from 99 to zero. Very strange how many companies miss implementing this useful feature.

Back to volume control, there is a glitch between volume level 35 and 36. It is a minor tick but otherwise it is silent as it adjusts its volume.

A switch on the right puts you in the menu. Navigating the few items in there is very difficult as now the volume control goes up and down in the list and pushing it selects the item. Well, as you push it, it can rotate a bit and change some other item. Worst part of this is that the gain setting is here and switching that from low to medium and high is very tedious. I really wish there was a button for this in the front panel. It is not like it would make it any more messy than it is now.

The rear connections are as you would expect:
View attachment 209177

I was yet disappointed to see no marking on of which channel is which with XLR connections.

As you see power is provided by a laptop sized switching supply pumping out 24 volts at 3 amps which means there is 75 watts on top here. Why does it need so much power? Because it is a small power amplifier:

View attachment 209178

Companies is famous for encouraging "opamp rolling" meaning replacing a pair of op-amps with discrete ones. To have a baseline, I went to the non-glamorous JRC5532. Owner had shipped this with Sparkos and Vivid op-amps. What was supposed to be an easy process was a nightmare. The supplied sockets have large round holes that are too large for the flat pins of the JRC (and Vivid as owner told me). You have to mess with the pins to get them to insert while putting enough side pressure to the pins. If you don't do this, you get partial connection and an unhappy unit. Despite my best effort that took some half hour, I still don't like the results. If you are going to provide replaceability you better make sure the job is doable.

Swapping the opamps requires resetting DC offset using the 4 pots that are undocumented. Google search indicated such a functionality. I found one channel close to zero but the other with 45 mv of DC offset. I adjusted both channels to near zero.

Back to power, during the testing the unit got quite warm. Those output transistors dissipate a ton of power which they push into bottom of the unit. They must run very hot in order for the top to get warm as well.

Burson Soloist 3X Performance Measurements
I started testing the unit with the mix of Vivid and Sparkos discrete op-amps as I noted. I was seeing very odd results so decided to do my testing with the JRC opamp as I noted. Alas, the problems were independent of the opamp as you see shortly.

My standardized test for (balanced) headphone amplifiers is to feed them 4 volts over XLR input and use the lowest gain setting+volume control combination that produces the same 4 volts ("unity gain). Low gain was not enough so I went up to medium gain, only to find the performance very poor:

View attachment 209179

I tried the high-gain setting and then turn down the volume and surprisingly, got much better results:

View attachment 209180

Cleary there is a problem in the way gain settings are implemented. If I have a more sensitive headphone, I like to take advantage of the lower noise of medium gain. Why penalize me with more distortion then?

Even with high gain, performance is not competitive:
View attachment 209182

Speaking of noise, here is the performance:
View attachment 209181

As you see, there is clear penalty for high gain setting.

For 50 mv output, I selected low gain and story got even worse there:

View attachment 209183

I don't know why one channel is so much worse. Such performance squarely lands the 3XP in the poor category of all headphone amps tested:

View attachment 209184

So the unit is not going to be usable with sensitive IEMs and even headphones.

Oddness continued in frequency response:
View attachment 209185

It did the same thing with the other opamps so it is not related to this. Why is one channel response so different than the other?

Power testing using 32 and 300 ohm shows very early rise in distortion indicating low feedback or design error:

View attachment 209186


View attachment 209187

The good news though is that you have tons and tons of power. This may be the most powerful headphone amplifier I have tested (above are all balanced output).

Here is the output voltage from which you can compute power at multiple impedances:
View attachment 209188

The best part of the design is perfect channel match courtesy of the Muse volume control IC:
View attachment 209189

Listening Tests
I started testing with my most difficult to drive headphone, the Dan Clark Stealth. In high gain, there was plenty of volume available with loud listening not requiring levels above 75. I then switched to Sennheiser HD650. Naturally there was enough volume there (balanced) to drive you to hearing loss. I tested it in unbalanced mode and here, I could get the amp to distort but this was already way past the point of safe listening. Same was the case with the Drop Ether CX.

I could not put my finger on audible distortion at comfortable listening levels.

Op-amp Rolling
I will do more extensive testing on this later but for now, here is the performance of the unit as it arrived with mix of Sparkos and Vivid op-amps:

View attachment 209190

This is basically the same as using JRC op-amp. Sources of noise and distortion are elsewhere.

Conclusions
To borrow a phrase, Burson Soloist 3XP is all power and little fineness. Not objectively anyways. If you have very inefficient headphones, it can provide power that few headphone amplifiers in the market can provide. At anything lower, you can get far better performance for much less money.

I can't recommend the Burson Soloist 3X Performance unless you have a niche application of needing its power.

---------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Terrible, and can one of the EEs here tell us why this huge number of components is required to do such a simple job?
 

HarmonicTHD

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Had a pair of Burson op amps a few years ago. (Eastern Electric Minimax DAC)
At the time Iwas looking for a fuller bodied presentation to minimise then effects of a low frequency suck out a particular room suffers with.
Contacted Burson and was assured that their op amps would provide the tone signature I was seeking. -
The Burson musical reproduction was ok - nearly as good as the various sub $10 pair alternatives I had for comparison.
Even more frustrating- one failed very shortly after receiving them.
then had a horrible time getting Burson to replace the failed unit.
Amps/OpAmps (DACs) are a very bad, inefficient and often costly equalizers.

If one prefers certain tonality get a „real“ EQ (Software or DSP) and or a Distortion Plug-in (VST). Less time consuming, more adaptable, less costly and you are in control of the output/result.
 

AudioSceptic

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From a aesthetic point of view I can`t complain: All metal & precisely machined case, massive frontplate, crisp & high contrast OLED Display, big & tactile volume knob, matching remote...

Not so great: Takes ages to do big adjustments to the volume (no accelaration, as Amir mentined too), really audible hiss with sensitive headphone on high gain, "plop" noise when connecting phones. My unit came with an empty remote battery and an op-amp died weeks after purchase. I`m happy that the headphones survived this...

To my ears it sounds absolutely fine btw... Have it set to about 70 on mid gain and use my RME ADI2 DAC to adjust the volume for different headphones from there. Will problably change to high after reading the test, and set a lower output level on the ADI2 to compensate if needed...
Why would you need a HP amp if you have an ADI2?
 

TK750

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If I remember correctly the flagship Burson has noctua fan inside it. Something tells me that if your desktop device needs a fan to function it's a fail.
The funniest thing is how they boast 'It is the first headphone amp in the world that works so hard it needs active cooling.' As if this is somehow a good thing. They do seem to have addressed some of Amir's concerns with labelling the inputs and adding menu buttons etc though. Oh and it is even more absurdly powerful and expensive.

https://www.bursonaudio.com/products/soloist-3x-grand-tourer/

Burson-Soloist-GT-S1.jpg

Burson-Soloist-GT-S6.jpg


This is the most egregious product for me though:

https://www.bursonaudio.com/products/super-charger-3a/

Screenshot 2022-05-27 121033.png
 

Veri

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Yet another high end device I can cross off my list.

It looks like RME and Benchmark are the only ones making state of the art components, other than the usual Chinese manufacturers that is.

Martin
Dodged a bullet, Martin!
 

muslhead

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Why would you need a HP amp if you have an ADI2?
because there are a few sets of headphones that owners feel the ADI does not provide enough power to the susvara and he6 are two that come to mind
 
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