There’s this whistle on Ebay now (I have no connexion to this auction BTW, just curious)
and it says DBSBT which I would take to mean D, Brass, Session Bore… but what is the T? Thumbhole? The whistle doesn’t appear to have one.
Black Tip. That’s how they’ve come for quite some years now, after a redesign. The Delrin fipple plug wraps around to include a smooth area that fits into the mouth. Some players don’t want to taste the metal. Comfy, too. I actually preferred the sound on my older whistle with the previous head.
Interesting. I’ve never owned a Burke, or knowingly seen a Burke, that didn’t have a delrin mouthpiece. Odd that he would feel the need to put that designation in the code of every metal whistle he’s made for years, when he doesn’t make them any other way, or at least doesn’t show them any other way on his site.
Here:
Kevin has it right. I thought that Joanie Madden suggested the black tip. I am one that does not like the taste of brass or aluminum. Delrin does not seem to have a taste that I notice. I appreciated the new design to the point where I sold most of the earlier Burkes I had and replaced them with the black tipped models.
Mike Burke seems to have made improvements regularly since he first offered whistles to the public. The changes are not always obvious visually. The improvements do not always end up with a new model designation as did the black tipped revision. Prior to the black tip, Burke had made two distinctly different generations of his whistles. I still have a couple examples of the version that immediately preceded the black tip. What was the DAlPro became the DASBT. So it seemed rational at the time to call the new, third generation (by my account), whistles “black tip” whistles. The voicing changed along with the black tip.
There have been significant changes since then but with no new nomenclature AFAIK. The revised tuning slide on the mid 2008-ish models could have prompted a new nomenclature. But I surmise that by that time the code for each model was pretty well known, accepted and entrenched.
l
A Burke by any other name would still play as sweet. 
Feadoggie
I don’t like metal mouthpieces either.
I still think it’s odd to have the “T”.
The other letters- D, B, SB- all refer to options that the customer chooses when ordering.
The “T” refers to a wholesale change Burke did to all his metal whistles, which is redundant if the whistle has a “B” or an “A” indicating Brass or Aluminum, and a date engraved which is after he made the change.
Maybe you could drop a note to Michael Burke and suggest standard nomenclature for him.
While it would seem logical to assume that the letters “SB” indicate “session bore” that’s apparently not the case. DBSBT, as Kevin noted, indicates key of D, Brass material, Session bore with the Black Tip. It should be the “BT” you have the issue with since that indicates the “black tip”.
There is actually no true consistency or universality in the model designation conventions in looking through my Burke whistles. Not all black tip models have the “BT” designation in the code. The narrow bore whistles are designated as “DAN” or “DBN” while still having the black tip.
And even after the black tip was the standard construction Mike still used the seemingly older nomenclature on some whistles. My aluminum high Eb for example has EbAlPro on the head as the model and it does have the black tip.
So I guess we shouldn’t try to put too much effort or concern into interpreting how Mike Burke designates his whistle models. I’m happy just to have the key of the whistle there to make sure I’ve picked up the right one.
Feadoggie
I think it’s reasonable enough not to change the nomenclature when there’s no design change. Otherwise, whenever you encountered a Burke with no “BT” in the code, you’d have to look up the date and find out when the non-BT whistles were abandoned to determine whether the whistle actually has a black tip or not. Or, which is probably more convenient, just look at the mouth piece.
I took the bag full of Burkes out for a few carols and other Christmas tunes with friends last night. A lot of keys came into play. So thinking about this thread I took note of the model designations on each whistle I pulled from the bag. Of the thirteen Burke aluminum whistles I had with me only one does not have the black delrin tip on the mouthpiece. Really, the session bore high D whistles are the only ones with the “BT” in the model designation. As I said before there is little in the way of stardization in the naming. Some do not even designate the material. That may be because many of the keys were only available in aluminum for a long time. That may have changed in recent years with more keys now made in brass.. Some say things like “Low C” while another may say “DCN” or “BbAlPro” or just the letter of the key. So it seems to be whatever works for Burke at the time the whistle is made.
Still enjoyable whistles no matter what he calls them.
Feadoggie