Sparkos S3601 + Burson FUN Amp
Mar 7, 2019 at 11:47 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 3

adydula

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I have had the Burson FUN amp in house for a week + now and its really caught my "ear"....really a great amp in this price range..and I have reviewed it elsewhere on this site.

This Burson amp promotes OP Amp rolling! Burson supplies a allen wrench to take off the cover to "play" or swap out op amps. Yes Burson sells discrete op amps!

I was sent a FUN for evaluation and it came the stock op amps, JRC 5534d’s.

Looking on the web for some other op amps to try I ran into Andrew Sparkos at Sparkoslabs. He has some discrete op amps that many folks have tried and like very much.

So I contacted Andrew and he quickly responded and told me I needed a pair of SS3601's for the FUN. In three days I received the op amps. Andrew answered several of my questions about how they build and test their op amps.

Annotation 2019-03-07 143800.jpg

So it took about 5 minutes to take off the FUN's top cover and remove and replace the 5534's with the SS 3601's.

First time on with Senn HD600's it was an immediate "WOW!" things really sound nice. So I listened to a few of my favorite demo recordings I am familiar with. Doc Powell's 97th & Columbus, Kenny Rankin's A Song For You, Thr33's Company's W3'llB3 Tog3th3r Again....

The immediate feeling here was the overall presentation and openess...clarity, transparency..the amp just disappears and gets out of the way. The small stuff in the recordings are discerned much easily than with the stock op amps.

The tonality of instruments is easily hard..you can easliy tell those are nylon strings on that guitar. Bill Whiters Live performance you hear his breathing and clearing his "nose'!! :>)..and the acoutics at CarnegeiHall are apparent and its like a real live performanc for once....

People ask me how is the bass or treble, its fine, is it better or worse. Its better but how do you measure that.

The thing with stuff like this is sometimes its not measureable, it just sounds better...and with the Sparkos it indeed
just sounds better. I put the stock op amps in and the sound is great but not as great as with the SS3601's in place.

Is it worth the money? In my humble opinion yes, its so much worth it..compared to what folks spend on NOS tubes!!

SparkosLabs is doing something right with these little gems! ...and The Burson Fun likes it as well!

Alex
 
Last edited:
Sep 8, 2019 at 6:03 PM Post #3 of 3
Yup Burson has a winner here....I recently got a beta test board from Schitt Audio, their new Unison USB interface for my original BIFROST MD dac, that went from Gen 2 to Gen 5 to Unison..
OMG..its another winner....

Take a look!
 

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