6 thoughts on “Burmester 909 Clone Amplifier (Transaudio T9.4)”
Let’s get the uncomfortable part out of the way immediately, because if I don’t say it, three of you will say it for me in the comments: the Transaudio T9.4 is a copy. It is a Chinese-built interpretation of the Burmester 909, an amplifier that in its current MK5 form costs roughly as much as a decent used Porsche, and the T9.4 costs roughly as much as the Porsche’s floor mats. I have no illusions about what this is. Neither should you. And yet here it sits in my rack, warm and smug, having spent the past two months quietly refusing to embarrass itself.
It arrived in a crate that the freight guy set down with the expression of a man reconsidering his career. Thirty-six kilos. Four hundred thirty millimeters wide, the same deep, and 230 tall, which means it does not so much go on a shelf as annex one. The front panel is that unmistakable Burmester chrome — a mirrored slab that reflects your listening room, your speakers, your face, and, on bad days, your entire relationship with this hobby. My wife walked past it and asked if I’d bought a commercial toaster. Mine came with two small cosmetic blemishes in the plating that I noticed on day one and stopped noticing by day four, which tells you something about how quickly the ears take over from the eyes.
The circuit, because that’s where this gets interesting.
The 909’s calling card has always been the X-Amp topology: a fully complementary, fully symmetrical circuit that is balanced from the input pins all the way to the speaker terminals, and DC-coupled throughout — no coupling capacitors anywhere in the signal path. That’s the party trick, and the T9.4 replicates it rather than merely gesturing at it. Feed it XLR and both halves of the waveform travel their own mirror-image path, each with its own gain stage, each with its own output bank, meeting only at your woofer. Feed it RCA and you’re using half the circuit’s ambition, which works fine but is a bit like buying a twin-engine plane and taxiing on one.
Inside, the layout is genuinely dual-mono: two separate 800VA transformers, one per channel, each feeding its own reservoir bank of eight 10,000µF electrolytics. That’s 80,000µF per channel, 160,000µF total, which is less a power supply than a small municipal reservoir. Output stage is seven pairs of Sanken bipolars per channel, matched, and biased at a claimed 120mA per device — do the arithmetic and each channel idles with something like 840mA flowing through the output bank before a single note arrives. That is why the thing draws 180 watts sitting there doing nothing, and why the heatsinks are pleasantly warm to the touch after an hour. It’s Class AB with an unusually generous Class A window at the bottom, which is precisely where most of us actually listen.
The specs, briefly, because numbers are seasoning and not the meal:
225 watts into 8 ohms, 450 watts into 4 ohms
Claimed THD 0.001% at full load; S/N ratio 120dB
Balanced XLR and single-ended RCA inputs
Soft-start, DC protection, speaker relay protection
36kg, 430 x 430 x 230mm, ~180W idle consumption
Take the distortion figure with the same grain of salt you’d apply to any manufacturer’s number arrived at under conditions nobody discloses. What matters is the doubling into 4 ohms, which is real, and which you can hear the moment you hand it a difficult load.
So what does it sound like?
The first thing that hit me was the bottom. Not “more bass” — grip. Absolute control – my B&W 802 Nautilus never sounded as clean and precise even with PS Audio BHL 250. On the Nils Lofgren’s Acoustic Live, the low strings on “Keith Don’t Go” stopped being a warm smear and became a physical event with a start and a stop. On big orchestral material — Solti’s Mahler Second, if you want to punish an amplifier — the timpani arrived with their skins intact rather than as generalized thunder. Whatever they’ve done with those transformers and that capacitance, the T9.4 has an iron fist wrapped in an unusually polite glove.
The midrange is where the clone reveals its accent. It’s slightly on the warm side of neutral — not syrupy, not euphonic in a Halloween-costume way, but there’s a faint rounding of leading edges that the real thing doesn’t have. Rickie Lee Jones’s voice on Pirates had all the breath and body I wanted, and the chest resonance was properly there, but the very finest filigree of her sibilance was drawn with a slightly softer pencil. Some of you will call that a flaw. Some of you will call it Tuesday and pour a drink.
The top end is polite. That’s the honest word. It’s extended, it’s clean, it doesn’t glare, and after four hours it never once made me want to leave the room — but the last measure of air, the sense that the cymbals exist in a room with a ceiling. Soundstaging, on the other hand, is a legitimate strength. It throws a wide, deep, stable stage with real front-to-back layering, and the noise floor is so low that quiet passages simply appear out of nothing.
Dynamics are the headline. This amplifier has that quality where crescendos don’t compress, they just keep going, and you find yourself listening at levels you didn’t intend. It is unflappable with inefficient speakers. It never sounds like it’s working.
The gripes: the speaker binding posts are the weakest part of the build and deserve better. Check your bias and DC offset when it arrives — mine were fine, but this is not a category where you assume. And it is heavy in a way that makes rack shuffling a two-person job and a one-chiropractor consequence.
FINAL VERDICT
Sound: Big, authoritative, quiet, slightly warm, with world-class bass control and dynamics that punch far above the asking price. Loses to the original on top-end air and midrange resolution.
Build: Serious iron and serious capacitance, honest dual-mono execution, mediocre binding posts, variable chrome.
Value: Preposterous.
Is it a Burmester 909? No – But I’m sure I will never find out how far it is from the real thing. It’s a very well-executed love letter to one, written in a language with a slight accent. But at something like one percent of the reference price, the T9.4 delivers perhaps eighty percent of the experience — and the twenty percent you’re missing costs the price of a house. I’d rather spend the difference on records. Strongly recommended, with a chiropractor on retainer.
Great review. Own one, can concur.
I cannot comment about the comparison to the real thing ofc (but I am kinda glad I never heard the real Burmester bc. that way I am not missing anything in mids and highs).
If you dig “china clones” you should check out sp-audio.com (and lots more of their products on Taobao)
Mr. Liang is taking things “clone” to the next level: Dart. FM. SymphonicLine and nowadays more and more builds of his own.
Boutique build quality and some small improvements on schematics to even exceed the original designs.
Let’s get the uncomfortable part out of the way immediately, because if I don’t say it, three of you will say it for me in the comments: the Transaudio T9.4 is a copy. It is a Chinese-built interpretation of the Burmester 909, an amplifier that in its current MK5 form costs roughly as much as a decent used Porsche, and the T9.4 costs roughly as much as the Porsche’s floor mats. I have no illusions about what this is. Neither should you. And yet here it sits in my rack, warm and smug, having spent the past two months quietly refusing to embarrass itself.
It arrived in a crate that the freight guy set down with the expression of a man reconsidering his career. Thirty-six kilos. Four hundred thirty millimeters wide, the same deep, and 230 tall, which means it does not so much go on a shelf as annex one. The front panel is that unmistakable Burmester chrome — a mirrored slab that reflects your listening room, your speakers, your face, and, on bad days, your entire relationship with this hobby. My wife walked past it and asked if I’d bought a commercial toaster. Mine came with two small cosmetic blemishes in the plating that I noticed on day one and stopped noticing by day four, which tells you something about how quickly the ears take over from the eyes.
The circuit, because that’s where this gets interesting.
The 909’s calling card has always been the X-Amp topology: a fully complementary, fully symmetrical circuit that is balanced from the input pins all the way to the speaker terminals, and DC-coupled throughout — no coupling capacitors anywhere in the signal path. That’s the party trick, and the T9.4 replicates it rather than merely gesturing at it. Feed it XLR and both halves of the waveform travel their own mirror-image path, each with its own gain stage, each with its own output bank, meeting only at your woofer. Feed it RCA and you’re using half the circuit’s ambition, which works fine but is a bit like buying a twin-engine plane and taxiing on one.
Inside, the layout is genuinely dual-mono: two separate 800VA transformers, one per channel, each feeding its own reservoir bank of eight 10,000µF electrolytics. That’s 80,000µF per channel, 160,000µF total, which is less a power supply than a small municipal reservoir. Output stage is seven pairs of Sanken bipolars per channel, matched, and biased at a claimed 120mA per device — do the arithmetic and each channel idles with something like 840mA flowing through the output bank before a single note arrives. That is why the thing draws 180 watts sitting there doing nothing, and why the heatsinks are pleasantly warm to the touch after an hour. It’s Class AB with an unusually generous Class A window at the bottom, which is precisely where most of us actually listen.
The specs, briefly, because numbers are seasoning and not the meal:
Take the distortion figure with the same grain of salt you’d apply to any manufacturer’s number arrived at under conditions nobody discloses. What matters is the doubling into 4 ohms, which is real, and which you can hear the moment you hand it a difficult load.
So what does it sound like?
The first thing that hit me was the bottom. Not “more bass” — grip. Absolute control – my B&W 802 Nautilus never sounded as clean and precise even with PS Audio BHL 250. On the Nils Lofgren’s Acoustic Live, the low strings on “Keith Don’t Go” stopped being a warm smear and became a physical event with a start and a stop. On big orchestral material — Solti’s Mahler Second, if you want to punish an amplifier — the timpani arrived with their skins intact rather than as generalized thunder. Whatever they’ve done with those transformers and that capacitance, the T9.4 has an iron fist wrapped in an unusually polite glove.
The midrange is where the clone reveals its accent. It’s slightly on the warm side of neutral — not syrupy, not euphonic in a Halloween-costume way, but there’s a faint rounding of leading edges that the real thing doesn’t have. Rickie Lee Jones’s voice on Pirates had all the breath and body I wanted, and the chest resonance was properly there, but the very finest filigree of her sibilance was drawn with a slightly softer pencil. Some of you will call that a flaw. Some of you will call it Tuesday and pour a drink.
The top end is polite. That’s the honest word. It’s extended, it’s clean, it doesn’t glare, and after four hours it never once made me want to leave the room — but the last measure of air, the sense that the cymbals exist in a room with a ceiling. Soundstaging, on the other hand, is a legitimate strength. It throws a wide, deep, stable stage with real front-to-back layering, and the noise floor is so low that quiet passages simply appear out of nothing.
Dynamics are the headline. This amplifier has that quality where crescendos don’t compress, they just keep going, and you find yourself listening at levels you didn’t intend. It is unflappable with inefficient speakers. It never sounds like it’s working.
The gripes: the speaker binding posts are the weakest part of the build and deserve better. Check your bias and DC offset when it arrives — mine were fine, but this is not a category where you assume. And it is heavy in a way that makes rack shuffling a two-person job and a one-chiropractor consequence.
FINAL VERDICT
Is it a Burmester 909? No – But I’m sure I will never find out how far it is from the real thing. It’s a very well-executed love letter to one, written in a language with a slight accent. But at something like one percent of the reference price, the T9.4 delivers perhaps eighty percent of the experience — and the twenty percent you’re missing costs the price of a house. I’d rather spend the difference on records. Strongly recommended, with a chiropractor on retainer.
Thanks for the review. Sounds like a cool amp.
Great review. Own one, can concur.
I cannot comment about the comparison to the real thing ofc (but I am kinda glad I never heard the real Burmester bc. that way I am not missing anything in mids and highs).
If you dig “china clones” you should check out sp-audio.com (and lots more of their products on Taobao)
Mr. Liang is taking things “clone” to the next level: Dart. FM. SymphonicLine and nowadays more and more builds of his own.
Boutique build quality and some small improvements on schematics to even exceed the original designs.
Super useful!
These reviews are very informative and helpful.
Thank you for your kind words.
Posted biasing instructions for the amp: https://tubemaze.biz/biasing-the-transaudio-t9-4/