Keith,
Perhaps I should attempt to clarify all this as posts in this thread and in your Merdian M3 thread make it confusing without reading all of both.
The Burmester 777 pre-amp was originally built by Dieter Burmester for himself and became the Burmester company's first production product in 1977. It was large and gold or black. It is not the slimline chrome pre-amp that you refer to in the M3 thread. I don't think any 777's were imported into the UK.
The Burmester 785 pre-amp started production in 1978. This was a smaller (about the size of a standard pre-amp or integrated) much cheaper pre-amp (but not that cheap for the time). It was black, although I think some gold finish ones were available at a premium? This pre-amp was commonly used with Merdian M10's & M2's. Again it is not the one you were thinking about. Subjective Audio sold quite a few of these for use with Meridian actives and the Alvin Gold M10 review in HiFi News back in 1984 also used the 785 as an alternative to the Meridian 101 pre-amp:
http://www.meridian-audio.info/public/m10_review[568].pdf
The Burmester 808 was their large top of the line modular pre-amp that was chrome or in gold at a premium. It was first produced in 1980 and is still available as the Burmester 808 mk5 as their top of the line pre-amp today. There was only a MK1, MkIII and MK5 as far as I know and not a MkII or MkIV because of name suspicion in the Far East market. This is again not the slimline units you were talking about. I use a Burmester 808 with my Merdian M10's. In 1985 Burmester produced the lovely 850 mono block power amps to go with the 808. These were again available in chrome or gold. Wish I had a chrome pair of these.
The Burmester 838 and 846
are the slimline units that you were thinking about. The 838 (1983) is a MM/MC phono stage with loading plug options and the 846 (1984) is the line stage. They were commonly used together to make a fully fledged pre-amp and can be seen one placed on top of the other in my photo link in the M3 thread, but each one on their own is quite slim and they were better used separated rather than as shown in the photo. They are about 19" long, but less than 2" tall. They were available in chrome or gold. They do though each have their own seperate small brick size power supply that connects to each slimline unit by a special XLR cord about 1.5 metres long. The idea was to keep the power supply as far away as possible from the main units and their inputs. The Burmester 808 above also has this seperate, but slightly larger power supply arrangement. Imported into the UK by Automation Sciences, but not many sold in this country. I had a loan pair from Subjective Audio for about three weeks. Very good, but I thought the 785 was a better match for M10's and I ultimately settled on the better still but much more expensive 808.
Hope this helps to clarify the Early Burmester range.
Jim
