mattjames355

So I've had my C class a couple of weeks and absolutely love it. Now other than the fact the traffic info on the sat nav inexplicably stopped working (for which it goes into a dealer tomorrow) my only real issue is the sound system.

The Burmester sounds great don't get me wrong, but I don't feel I've found the 'sweet spot' yet when playing with the settings.

How do people on here have it set up? And of course for which types of music?

vic viper

I felt that I had to reduce the midtones far under the centre level, to any kind of music.
Then I havnt decided what sounds best, with or without surround.

StanNH

The source is critical ... FM, CD, MP3, satellite, smartphone, etc. ... and has a large effect on the sound quality.

Myself, I boost treble and midrange, then adjust bass ... but I do have slight high frequency hearing loss.

You'll also find that Surround changes the sound ... I find it introduces more of a bass sound characteristic ... not as clean but fuller sounding. You can also move the sound stage to the rear or more forward to effect what you hear up front.

I'd use a good CD to make the initial adjustments, if for no other reason than to see how good the system can sound. Then change those settings for your other source material ... the system will remember the settings.

whkento

I don't know yet, but couldn't resist the "Butmester" title of the thread...

floridadriver

Just on my test drives, the system was IMPRESSIVE, but could tell the settings would have to be very different for different sources of music. Usually less adjustment off center the better on car's settings of sound, and the sweet spot varies a lot between listeners (and level of their hearing loss).

Eilers

Very classy.. i guess it must be the the blessing of ignorance (from author of thread).

I am sure Bugatti Veyron owners appreciate that one.

edit. just saw he used correct name in post, so must just be a type-O sorry for jumping the gun, but am tired, from 75% don't realise the prestige in having a Burmester sound system in their car. Seen and read countless reviews whereiy it is refered to as "Burmeister"

Glyn M Ruck

Dieter Burmester's home audio products are fabulous but you had better have deep pockets!

whkento

What type of audio sources / music genre, etc. do you guys use to adjust your settings?

I don't have the car yet, or the user's manual for the Burmester system. I like to listen to anything from Beethoven to Dave Brubeck to Soundgarden. Does the system have various presets you can adjust?

I'm really looking forward to trying it out!

StanNH

I listen to mostly light rock and folk ... my wife loves show tunes. My most commonly used source is satellite, but that's a very compressed format and won't really be the ideal source for checking out your Burmester system. CD's are always better, with much less loss. I have been copying cuts from CD's to the Music Register and, although the copying process is slow, the sound quality seems very good. It's a good way to access your favorite music without having to swap CD's all the time.

The Burmester has no presets, just a simple equalizer with treble, midrange, and bass adjustments. It also has a Surround on/off mode, the usual fade and balance, and an automatic volume adjustment which varies the volume with speed and noise. I found the auto volume to be fairly useless and very artificial ... it actually seemed to degrade the sound quality so I keep it off at all times.

The Surround mode has an effect in that it does create a "fuller" sound, but it's not as clean a sound. I'm still playing with that and found I have to readjust the equalizer settings when I use it.

Glyn M Ruck

Stan ~ I have had no time to play with the Burmester. Only serious listening was in the S Class. Does it remember equaliser settings for different inputs?

I also wonder whether there is a hidden menu somewhere like on certain other Mercs where you can fine tune all the factory defaults.

StanNH

Yes, it will remember the settings for each input.

I have not found a menu that will change the defaults but, after three months, I think I've only mastered about half of this very involved menu/sub menu/ sub sub menu/alternate menu/side swipe, down swipe, up swipe menu labyrinth.

Glyn M Ruck

Thanks ~ That makes sense as equalisation required could vary considerably by input.

The hidden menues like that on the W204 Audio 20 are not meant to be found by the user. They are the basic default set up for the audio hostile environment of a car.

Acapulco Bill on the W204 forum found them. He is an orchestral conductor & was delighted he could fiddle.

Ron J

When you get into higher end systems the quality of the source really makes a difference. Music that sounds great on lesser systems sound terrible on higher end systems because you can hear imperfections in the source which you couldn't before. The Burmeister system in the C class is very good but not as good as in the S class. I agree with StanNH that you should go with uncompressed CD, or a lossless format like flac or aac, if possible. They sound better than mp3s, even at 320 kbps.

whkento

Thanks. Good info. It would be nice to have a little more control than just high-, mid-, and low-range.

Btw, I'll look for the W204 hidden menu thread, but if you could provide a link, I'd appreciate it...

floridadriver

How long does it take to copy a cd to hard drive? And more a computer question, can you burn CD without compression to USB and use that with no loss? Will the new C accept whatever format that would be? Thanks!

StanNH

I've only copied to the music register so far. It copies directly from the CD to HDD, so you'll be listening to the tracks you're copying while the process goes on. You can switch to another source while copying, but the copy time is the same ... a 3 minute track takes 3 minutes to copy.

Mr Enigma

You can get various bits of software for your computer to do this. The average person compresses the files to MP3 and you can choose how much you want to compress by (so the more compression the lower the quality). I used to compress to 128kbps. There are new lossless compression formats but I don't have much knowledge on these. The compression times is fairly short - you're looking at circa 10 mins pre CD.

floridadriver

Thanks for info gentlemen. IF you load a CD and copy and past the audio files uncompressed onto a USB stick, putting the songs in a folder for each album, will the W205 find and play them? This would obviously be no compression and eat a fair amount of storage on the USB stick.

Mr Enigma

You can't just simply drag and drop off a CD - you need some CD ripping software (there are plenty of free ones available - just google it). This extracts the audio into an uncompressed format that *may* be compatible with the COMAND system. I say *may* because I haven't tried it myself but I don't see why it shouldn't play these files.


As for the size, each CD is approximately 700MB in size. Most CDs aren't full to the brim of music so you can estimate that you will have ~500MB of music data which is ~ 0.5GB. So if you have a 32GB USB stick you should be able to store ~64 albums uncompressed.


However, just to add to the advantages of compression - a compressed music CD will take ~ 0.1GB with little loss of quality. So a 32GB card should store ~ 320 albums. That's 50x more.


Even with lossless compression you can get more than twice as many albums on a USB than just using the uncompressed versions.


[Obviously this is all back of the envelope estimations for you.]

DerekACS

The copy time you mentioned above seems very long compared to the Harmon Kardon system in the MY2015 W212. In my 2015 E250BT, an entire CD is copied to the Music Register in 3-4 minutes. I wonder why the W205 Burmester system is so slow to copy ?

StanNH

I've done a few albums, and it always seems to be no faster than what's playing. I'm using CD to HDD, but I don't know if there's a faster option I'm just not seeing.

NYC-Style

That doesn't sound right...I was able to plug my portable HDD and copy 1520 tracks in about 10 minutes onto the media register...FYI although you may be listening to the current track it may have already copied and the next track is being copied...you're "listening" to the CD however the media register has already copied it...

StanNH

There is a progress bar which pops up when copying ... and it's slow when copying from a CD to HDD. I have not tried copying from an external source.

mbrackeva

Don't know why you would copy to the internal HDD. I just plug in my external HDD and play from there. I have 5000+ tracks on it, so can do quite a while before it starts repeating.

Oh, and to remain on topic, I love the Burmester sound! I fiddled with the settings for a while, and then I set them to default again and just left it at that. I'm happy enough.

l3it3r

Personally, I love the Burmester system, but It has really drawn focus to how HORRIBLE SiriusXM's sound quality is. The initial service runs out in October and will not be renewed. I'll be sticking to Bluetooth from my iPhone.