One thought on “Burmester 909 Clone Amplifier (ASYPDZSW BL-9)”
There is a particular sound a screw makes when it is loose inside a very heavy amplifier and a UPS driver is carrying that amplifier up your driveway. A small, dry, gravelly rattle — if you’ve ever unpacked audio gear, it is the worst noise in the hobby. I heard it seven times, rolling around inside the ASYPDZSW BL-9 like dice in a cup, before I’d even cut the tape.
I’ll come back to that. First, though, we have to deal with the name, because I can’t keep typing it without saying something. ASYPDZSW. Eight consonants in a trench coat. Not an acronym, not an abbreviation, not pronounceable in any language I’m aware of — it reads like the last thing a keyboard transmits before it dies, or like somebody rested a forearm on the top row while filling out the trademark form and the clerk shrugged and stamped it. Try saying it out loud; whatever came out of your mouth was wrong, and so was mine. And then the same company turned around and named the product BL-9 — crisp, restrained, faintly Germanic, exactly right. Two different people named this thing, and I’d like to buy the second one a drink.
Anyway. Let’s start where a review should start, which is with the sound, because the sound is excellent.
Longtime readers know I spent serious time with the Transaudio T9.4, the other well-known Burmester 909 clone, and concluded it delivered eighty percent of a six-figure amplifier for one percent of the money. The BL-9 follows the same recipe: X-Amp topology, fully complementary and DC-coupled, dual-mono from the wall socket inward, two hefty toroids, banks of 10,000µF filter caps stacked like an artillery battery, and seven pairs of output devices per channel on heatsinks that could heat a Brooklyn walk-up.
So does it sound different from the T9.4? No — and “sounds the same” is the sort of lazy phrase usually thrown at gear the writer hasn’t actually listened to, so understand that I listened, a lot. Same iron-fisted grip down low, the kind of control where a kick drum stops exactly when the recording says it should and not a millisecond later. Same dynamic headroom, where crescendos refuse to compress — turn it up and it simply gets louder, which sounds obvious until you remember how many amplifiers get smaller when pushed. Same faintly warm midrange with that gentle rounding of leading edges that keeps massed strings from turning into sandpaper. Same polite treble. Blindfold me, swap them, and I’d fail the test.
Where the BL-9 pulls ahead is everything you touch rather than everything you hear. The layout is smarter. The T9.4 puts things in places that make you nervous the moment a shipping label enters the picture; the BL-9 arranges its boards, capacitor banks and transformer mounts in a far more survivable way. The support structures are seriously heavy duty — thick brackets, real hardware, transformers clamped with bolts you could hang a bicycle from. Nothing in there flexes. And for anyone who means to own this amplifier rather than merely admire it, the bias pots are right there: lift the lid, probes across the emitter resistors, turn a screwdriver. That’s how it should be, and it’s depressingly rare.
The faceplate deserves a mention too. The T9.4 arrives either blank — which reads as “unfinished prototype” in a living room — or wearing a Transaudio logo. The BL-9’s front plate is genuinely attractive: black, ribbed, a vertical green light bar down the middle, a discreet power button, a small script “BL-9” badge below. It looks like a product — like something with a five-figure price tag. Note also what is not on that faceplate: eight consonants. Restraint, at last.
Now the part where I stop being nice.
I ordered directly from ASYPDZSW on AliExpress. It took seven days to ship. Fine — I assume these are built to order, and I’d rather wait for a unit assembled deliberately than one grabbed off a shelf. What is not fine is that I asked questions every single day of those seven days and got not one reply. Not a word. Not an emoji. So set your expectations now: there is no support. There is a transaction, then silence, then a box.
Once it moved it arrived quickly by UPS, and inside was that rattle: seven screws had backed themselves out in transit — great craftsmanship, gentlemen — and were touring the chassis. I contacted the store. You know how that went – silence. They turned out to belong to the supplementary transformer supports, which are also secured by enormous bolts, so nothing catastrophic happened — but you can’t put them back without substantially disassembling the amp, and there is no universe in which loose metal bouncing around a live-voltage chassis is acceptable.
Having confirmed nothing else was rolling around in there, I checked the bias. One channel measured 30mV across the emitter resistors, the other 48mV. Across 0.47Ω, per transistor, fourteen devices a side, that’s roughly 64mA per device versus 102mA — about 0.9A of idle current on one side and 1.4A on the other, some 50 to 60 watts of dissipation difference at idle, which is why one heatsink ran noticeably warmer than the other before a note was played. More importantly for what you hear: the class A window before the amp slides into AB works out to about 13 watts on the cold channel and roughly 33 on the hot one. My left and right speakers were being driven by two meaningfully different amplifiers. Quality control at its finest.
Twenty minutes with a meter and a screwdriver — thank you again, accessible bias pots — and both channels sit at 45mV: about 96mA per device, 1.34A per channel, a ~29W class A window per side, heatsinks warming evenly, everything symmetrical and happy. What emerged from that adjustment is the amplifier described several paragraphs above, and it is a joy.
Sound: indistinguishable from the T9.4 — massive dynamics, ironclad bass, a touch of warmth, a slightly polite top end.
Build: heavy-duty support structures, a smarter and more shipping-resistant layout, bias pots you can actually reach.
Cosmetics: the best-looking front plate of any 909 clone I’ve handled.
Execution: seven screws loose in the chassis, a 60 percent bias mismatch between channels.
Service: none. Messages vanish into the void.
Final verdict: Great design, poor execution, horrible service. On engineering and chassis merit the BL-9 is the best-realized 909 clone I’ve handled, and you’ll probably end up loving it — after you open it, inventory the loose hardware and set the bias yourself. If you can’t do that, or won’t, don’t buy it, because there is nobody on the other end of the order who will do it for you. It’s a buy-and-pray situation, and good luck getting the prayer past the pronunciation. I prayed, I got lucky, and now there’s a very good amplifier in my rack. Your mileage, and your screws, may vary.
There is a particular sound a screw makes when it is loose inside a very heavy amplifier and a UPS driver is carrying that amplifier up your driveway. A small, dry, gravelly rattle — if you’ve ever unpacked audio gear, it is the worst noise in the hobby. I heard it seven times, rolling around inside the ASYPDZSW BL-9 like dice in a cup, before I’d even cut the tape.
I’ll come back to that. First, though, we have to deal with the name, because I can’t keep typing it without saying something. ASYPDZSW. Eight consonants in a trench coat. Not an acronym, not an abbreviation, not pronounceable in any language I’m aware of — it reads like the last thing a keyboard transmits before it dies, or like somebody rested a forearm on the top row while filling out the trademark form and the clerk shrugged and stamped it. Try saying it out loud; whatever came out of your mouth was wrong, and so was mine. And then the same company turned around and named the product BL-9 — crisp, restrained, faintly Germanic, exactly right. Two different people named this thing, and I’d like to buy the second one a drink.
Anyway. Let’s start where a review should start, which is with the sound, because the sound is excellent.
Longtime readers know I spent serious time with the Transaudio T9.4, the other well-known Burmester 909 clone, and concluded it delivered eighty percent of a six-figure amplifier for one percent of the money. The BL-9 follows the same recipe: X-Amp topology, fully complementary and DC-coupled, dual-mono from the wall socket inward, two hefty toroids, banks of 10,000µF filter caps stacked like an artillery battery, and seven pairs of output devices per channel on heatsinks that could heat a Brooklyn walk-up.
So does it sound different from the T9.4? No — and “sounds the same” is the sort of lazy phrase usually thrown at gear the writer hasn’t actually listened to, so understand that I listened, a lot. Same iron-fisted grip down low, the kind of control where a kick drum stops exactly when the recording says it should and not a millisecond later. Same dynamic headroom, where crescendos refuse to compress — turn it up and it simply gets louder, which sounds obvious until you remember how many amplifiers get smaller when pushed. Same faintly warm midrange with that gentle rounding of leading edges that keeps massed strings from turning into sandpaper. Same polite treble. Blindfold me, swap them, and I’d fail the test.
Where the BL-9 pulls ahead is everything you touch rather than everything you hear. The layout is smarter. The T9.4 puts things in places that make you nervous the moment a shipping label enters the picture; the BL-9 arranges its boards, capacitor banks and transformer mounts in a far more survivable way. The support structures are seriously heavy duty — thick brackets, real hardware, transformers clamped with bolts you could hang a bicycle from. Nothing in there flexes. And for anyone who means to own this amplifier rather than merely admire it, the bias pots are right there: lift the lid, probes across the emitter resistors, turn a screwdriver. That’s how it should be, and it’s depressingly rare.
The faceplate deserves a mention too. The T9.4 arrives either blank — which reads as “unfinished prototype” in a living room — or wearing a Transaudio logo. The BL-9’s front plate is genuinely attractive: black, ribbed, a vertical green light bar down the middle, a discreet power button, a small script “BL-9” badge below. It looks like a product — like something with a five-figure price tag. Note also what is not on that faceplate: eight consonants. Restraint, at last.
Now the part where I stop being nice.
I ordered directly from ASYPDZSW on AliExpress. It took seven days to ship. Fine — I assume these are built to order, and I’d rather wait for a unit assembled deliberately than one grabbed off a shelf. What is not fine is that I asked questions every single day of those seven days and got not one reply. Not a word. Not an emoji. So set your expectations now: there is no support. There is a transaction, then silence, then a box.
Once it moved it arrived quickly by UPS, and inside was that rattle: seven screws had backed themselves out in transit — great craftsmanship, gentlemen — and were touring the chassis. I contacted the store. You know how that went – silence. They turned out to belong to the supplementary transformer supports, which are also secured by enormous bolts, so nothing catastrophic happened — but you can’t put them back without substantially disassembling the amp, and there is no universe in which loose metal bouncing around a live-voltage chassis is acceptable.
Having confirmed nothing else was rolling around in there, I checked the bias. One channel measured 30mV across the emitter resistors, the other 48mV. Across 0.47Ω, per transistor, fourteen devices a side, that’s roughly 64mA per device versus 102mA — about 0.9A of idle current on one side and 1.4A on the other, some 50 to 60 watts of dissipation difference at idle, which is why one heatsink ran noticeably warmer than the other before a note was played. More importantly for what you hear: the class A window before the amp slides into AB works out to about 13 watts on the cold channel and roughly 33 on the hot one. My left and right speakers were being driven by two meaningfully different amplifiers. Quality control at its finest.
Twenty minutes with a meter and a screwdriver — thank you again, accessible bias pots — and both channels sit at 45mV: about 96mA per device, 1.34A per channel, a ~29W class A window per side, heatsinks warming evenly, everything symmetrical and happy. What emerged from that adjustment is the amplifier described several paragraphs above, and it is a joy.
Final verdict: Great design, poor execution, horrible service. On engineering and chassis merit the BL-9 is the best-realized 909 clone I’ve handled, and you’ll probably end up loving it — after you open it, inventory the loose hardware and set the bias yourself. If you can’t do that, or won’t, don’t buy it, because there is nobody on the other end of the order who will do it for you. It’s a buy-and-pray situation, and good luck getting the prayer past the pronunciation. I prayed, I got lucky, and now there’s a very good amplifier in my rack. Your mileage, and your screws, may vary.