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   There are two basic methods of reporting on an amp's performance. Every review you read will be either a bench test, in which the reviewer dispassionately records 5% t.h.d. from a continuous sine wave at 120 watts, or it will be a chatty and fairly subjective opinion, e.g. "Crikey! The treble knob has just come off in my hand but this is still a pleasant enough little gadget  "Method One depends on. electronic measuring equipment. Method Two depends on ears.

Personally I prefer Method two. But it can occasionally lead you astray. In the case of this Burman combo, for example, the first thing my ears told me when the amp was switched on was that someone had left a door open and it was blowing a hurricane outside. This turned out not to be the case. It's just that the Burman, being a bit new, was doing its best to give a bad impression by hissing and swooshing like an Atlantic gale around a wrecked oil tanker.Hmmm.. . .

When a guitar lead was slotted into the appropriate hole,this impression was not markedly altered. The guitar I should point out, happened to be a very old Rickenbacker 3 pick-up semi-acoustic job with washing line for strings, empty throat-lozenge tins for pick-ups,and a fretboard which looked like the 8th Army had just used it for parade duty. It was not, all in all, a pretty sight. But it was the only guitar in the Beat offices at the time.

Greg Burman, the designer of this amp, and indeed of a whole series of amps (more of this later) was obviously too nice a chap to deserve having the whole shooting match thrown at his head, and so I retired to the tranquillity of my secret underground lab to mull over the Burman in private. These are the things I noticed about it: on the front panel are three gain controls(!), bass, middle, treble and presence rotary controls, a switch marked "H.F Cut" a rotary reverb control, a pushbutton on-off switch and two inputs. This lot was neatly encased atop a 12" speaker, and shielded from the slings and arrows of outrageous roadies by means of an exceedingly sturdy cabinet, whose corners were all covered with neat black metal protectors. There was no plastic handle on the top. Instead, the Burman had two snap-down metal carrying handles at the side. This, folks, is better than a) a plastic handle at the top because two people can carry the thing rather than a single Welterweight Champion and b) a pair of recessed bars because there's no pressure from the cabinet to raise bruises on the back of the hand. Nice, I thought, grudgingly...

And with each. new discovery, things continued to look better. This combo utilises two KT77 valves on the output stage and four ECC83's for the pre-amp. The transformer is a massive beast for an amp of (supposedly) only 5O watts. There are sockets on the back for linking up slaves and additional cabinets, as well as a socket for operating the reverb.In the pre-production model I tested there wasn't actually any reverb spring to be seen, but the production version will have an Accutronics reverb mounted vertically on the inside.

The power supply to the amp enters through a rather old-fashioned 3-pin round plug which allows the musician to detach his cable altogether and stow it away for safe-keeping during transit - always a welcome feature, this. Finally, the combo has no wheels, but these are probably unnecessary in any case thanks to the thoughtfully designed handles, and the fact that it is extremely compact (21 1/2" high x 19 1/2" wide x 11 1/2" deep).

Burman are a small company operating out of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. AII their amps are completely hand-built. One might therefore expect a fair number of pretty respectable guitar sounds to come hurtling from the speaker of this model, the PRO 501. And by God they did, once I'd got my hands on a decent guitar. Time for the purely subjective reviewer to take over:

Talk about a beast! This one can make your old Hofner Verithin sing like a bird or roar like an enraged grizzly bear. The top notes zip out needle-sharp and sting you tight in the ear, whilst the bass shakes your ribcage fit to dismantle it rib by rib. The sound of those darn valves is so sweet - something I'd nearly forgotten thanks to the unending queue of fair-to-middling transistorised jobs that has plodded through Beat's offices over the last few years. Have you noticed how transistorised amplifiers make you fight for the right tone, the standard issue being a rather dull and lifeless gronk, which metamorphoses into a weary buzz as the gain control overloads the pre-amp? I thought so.
 
Manufacturers can turn out tranny amps at an astonishing rate. They're cheaper and quicker to build than the valve sort. But most of these companies spend their time assuring the hapless punter that he can "get the valve sound" from their solid-state machinery! Valves are old-fashioned, it seems, not to mention "hard to obtain these days" and "expensive to replace". Greg Burman tried using transistors in the front end, but decided that the sound took a back seat in such cases. It was valves or nothing.

There are of course some who will sneer at anyone who professes a regard for glass tubes in preference to p.c.b.'s, in the same way as there are those who continue to drink Grotney's when they could be drinking beer, and eat Gruderloaf instead of bread. Don't be fooled. There really is a difference!

On the PRO 501 the all valve power is controlled by means of no less than three gain knobs, which means that the varieties of sound obtainable from the amplifier are almost infinite, because of course the tone changes depending on the amount of distortion you care to use. Long, long sustain is obtainable at any volume, but best of all is that satisfying crunch of a chord unpolluted by solid-state circuitry. The brightness and clarity of this sound when coloured with just the correct degree of overdrive cannot be paralleled. It would take an entire article to describe the different shades of sound which can, with a little practice, be coaxed from this amp. But the important thing is that they can be obtained. The true function of an amplifier is to bring out the true sound of an instrument, and when the tone controls on this model are set flat, it does just that. It doesn't alter the sound of the guitar, it merely emphasises whatever tonal areas of the instrument you want it to.

Many guitarists have driven themselves to distraction trying to find an amp that didn't make their guitar sound like something the dog threw up -not realising that many amps today are over-complicated, and are trying to be instruments in their own right. This can only lead to a distortion, in the literal sense, of what a guitar or keyboard is meant to sound like.

I was supplied with a list of control settings for use with the Burman, with everything from "flat sound" to "reverse compression" I would suggest that a copy of this be supplied with every amp sold, since it will help the purchaser get to grips with the somewhat unusual control section.

The Burman amp which will be most commonly seen around the shops in the next few months will be the 100 watt version of the one we tested. Known as the PRO 2000, this model can be linked up in sets of four to provide a 400 watt stack of terrifying power. Professionals and rich semi-pro's are strongly advised to take note. The other Burman in this new series is the two-speaker version of the PRO 5O1, and goes by the quaint name of PRO 502.

Thus just one reservation concerning the 5O1 remains: the noise produced by those gain controls. Greg has promised to look into the problem, and will perhaps try fitting a noise gate into the works, since he can't use better components than he does already - they don't exist. In practice the user won't find the hiss a problem, since it is most unlikely that he will want to wind all three right up: they weren't designed with that purpose in mind.

On the other hand, this slightly mars what would otherwise be the best amplifier I have used in many a long year. By comparison, the Marshall transistor combo tested a short while back now sounds positively miserable to my ears, even though it is one of the best of its kind. Burman have a potential giant on their hands, and it would be a shame to let the opportunity slip. I give them 9 out of 10. For sheer sound, I give them 10. And believe me, that mark doesn't get awarded all that often.

                                                                          Tested P.D. with Gibson,