Burmester 111 Musiccenter

The Burmester 111 Musiccenter is the Reference Line's integrated digital source — preamplifier, DAC, streamer, and library server engineered into one chassis to Reference Line standards. For the listener whose library is digital and whose sources stream, the 111 is the entire front half of a reference system in a single Burmester component.

The engineering case is the signal path. Every box eliminated from a digital chain removes an interconnect, a set of connectors, a power supply, and a clock boundary. The 111 collapses four components' worth of that into one: Ethernet-attached streaming and on-board library storage feed the Reference Line DAC section directly, a USB input accepts external digital sources, and the integrated preamplifier stage delivers balanced XLR straight to the power amplifier. Between the stored file and the power amplifier's input terminals, nothing exists that Burmester did not engineer as part of one instrument.

The integrated display and chrome front panel place the 111 visually at the center of the system it functionally is — source selection, library navigation, and level control in one place, with all major streaming services and the local library presented together.

The configuration question the 111 settles is elegant: with it, a complete Reference Line system is three components — 111, power amplifier, loudspeakers. Listeners who prefer dedicated separates for each function look instead to the 069 for disc playback with the 249 or 808 MK5 handling control. Both architectures are legitimate; they serve different instincts about what a system should be. LMC demonstrates the 111 in exactly this role in Scottsdale — hear a three-component Reference chain and judge whether the simplicity costs anything you can hear. Walk in during business hours or book ahead.