corus vs coherence 2

This is a really good question, and can be generalized to a lot of different high-end manufacturers and their philosophy, technology, and marketing.
I have owned Rowland consonance and consummate preamps, and both sounded excellent and worked really well, with one of the best remote controls i have EVER seen. not content with these superb pieces, Jeff went on to create the synergy and the coherence-2, one with, and one without, battery power. now he has two preamps which AGAIN offer batteries or No, but similar designs.
in mentioning the Coherence Two, you bring up quite a mystery in that it had an outboard power supply with rechargeable battery packs. it was expensive and very elegant in design, but it got pulled from the market sort of early and without much explaination. some said it was too difficult to produce for the given price (although the price was not all that unusual for the time). perhaps there was a problem with getting the batteries to perform in an optimal way. plus you had to get new ones from JRDG, the only supplier
in the world for that particular design. BUT... the preamp had to be very very quiet indeed, with lots of room to separate noise-generating parts from other noise-sensitive ones, a specialty Jeff had a good reputation for knowing a great deal about. As for the Synergy and Synergy-2, they are balanced-only,
and are also highly regarded with outboard power supplies. must be pretty good, right? not as good as the newest pre's though.
with all of the water under the bridge, and as much as i respect this company (having owned preamps and amps made by them myself), what
IS the advantage of a Corus line stage on A/C power compared to a properly
running Coherence-2 on battery power? how obvious would this difference be? and is anyone going to conduct this comparison and report on it in a well-read journal?
Mark Levinson is coming out with a new $25,000 preamp as well, the #52,which should be "a bit" better than the 326S ($10,000), their current best line-stage. now the 326S is said to be DEAD QUIET with a huge stage, etc.
so what is the #52 going to do? dare i ask? i don't mean to be cynical here, and one picture of the huge two-box reference to come out shortly is very impressive (naturally), but when is the need to "upgrade" from a $10K pre to a $25K pre based purely on value and markedly superior sonics as opposed to
jerking audiophiles around yet again? is the day soon to come where the best line stages will all be over $20,000... $30,000...? Audio Research certainly is not waiting for the SOTA pricing question to go unanswered. 1st you have the Anniversary-40, and now the REF-10, which blows the tires off of the A-40 and the poor little 5SE. someone bring me a drink (of water that is...) everyone desires a really superb preamp to anchor their highly coherent sound system.
QUESTION IS, when is enough enough? when can we expect the VERY BEST POSSIBLE RECORDINGS to be released with clear labeling of what is inside, so we don't have to sit in front of our humongous speakers and be disappointed yet again at the fumbling/bumbling results of engineers focusing on the wrong objectives? even with all of the helpful suggestions/reviews about gear and room acoustics, there STILL is a lot of inferior source material out there. and for a few bucks more (or less) for the "right stuff" we can get light-years closer to realistic sound.

thanks for the great discussion regarding REAL improvements in the sound of these components. BTW, i didn't know that the Criterion preamp had been discontinued....! wow, this IS a surprise. and the upgraded power supply for Corus is soon to be released- also, very interesting news indeed.
i guess i am getting a moldy brain when it comes to what these newer products can do for a more realistic presentation. i just tend to think of, for example, the Pass Aleph-P, which came out some time ago, a simple box running in Class-A, which sounded almost as good as a passive preamp in a stereophile test. i get "stuck" i suppose in thinking that at a certain point, you have a great preamp, so quit window shopping- in this case for an XP-30 ( or the rumored XS-series preamp to be releaseed). but i admit my personal biases- even though, as a Rowland audio-salesman told me as i took home my (1st big purchase) Consonance from his store , that "now you're done, that piece of your audio system is taken care of". i finally had a 1st rate, high-end component, built to an incredible standard, nothing like my mid-fi harman kardon preamp i had brought in on trade.
but i must now face a different challenge- WHICH high-end preamp gets out of the way of the music better than all of the other offerings at prices i can't afford anyway?
I kept worrying about how much money i had just spent- $3500 for (just) a preamp, and yet since that fateful day, I have had a Pass Aleph-P, a Consummate, and EMM lab pre/dac, a levinson 380S, and now a levinson 326S. and THAT is now quickly becoming passe... i think i need a big spoonful of Geritol and a nice long nap.
you youngsters better carry on without me....

Let me throw another comment into this discussion since i have owned the Model-12 monoblocks. hey, remember the #10 and #12? doesn't come up much in discussions. after hearing Diane Krall through a #10 at the local dealer (whose main listening room is a marvel of great acoustics) i threw a large am't of money down on the 12's. they sounded absolutely great except they didn't like brown outs- which i have all the time. after going back to colorado twice Jeff assured me the ps's had been modified/replaced and would never give me any more problems.
by then i was kinda bummed out about the whole affair and got Levinson 33H amps which completely floored me- dynamics and musical and every nice adjective you can come up with. i still have the 12's as backup and can't decide whether to sell them or not. but they easily matched the Pass Aleph 1.2's (the biggest in that line) for smooth relaxed "tube sound without the tubes" presentation. without getting so hot.
but even if the 10 and 12 never got much attention. am i to understand that the newer products are going to make the 12's sound veiled or whatever...?
even with significant improvements i AM interested in the new pieces. BUT-
that day listening to Ms.Krall years ago was pretty amazing...thrilling. $14,400 for a pair of amps- WOW, i must have been pretty moved...

GREAT DISCUSSION-THANKS GUIDO. look i come to praise Cesar, not to.. well, you know. but your information yields a lot of points which reinforce what i have experienced. JRDG welcomes you to participate in a grand experiment. Jeff is one of the best pair of ears you could want and he never tires of advancing the goal
of sweetness combined with an equal measure of transparency. the caveat is of course that without a large bank account one can only play this game once in a great while, if at all. I had wanted a Model 8, but ended up with a used Levinson 23.5 instead due to $$ of course. long time later i had a good time with a Krell FPB-300. only after hearing the Pass 1.2 Class-A amps did i decide after a few more years of getting the Rowland 12's. But the left channel power supply made a disturbing noise, and after sending it in for repairs, it came back with the same exact problem. Kicking myself for paying a big gob of money for them and getting a "gee, that's too bad" from the dealer, i was
not inclined to see where Rowland's experiments were going to go. as it turned out, not all that well for a good while. I have no doubt that the 725's for $30K are "probablu" nothing less than incredible, and not too much money considering what they can do (with all of the other necessary and expensive components included set up in an excellent listening environment).
but wait- if the 825 is even better, then what?
anyone still running a Levinson 33H amp can STILL lay claim to a very solid performer- TONS of clean power and build quiality and sound quality that kinda "smooshed" the Rowland 12's in a number of areas. Just no diamond-cut aluminum (this covered the entire amp btw). I long for and HOPE TO SEE
a product, no matter who makes it, that holds its own for at LEAST 5-7 years.
that will take a lot of research, and a lot of field testing. but i don't give a crap (pardon my french) if it is a black square box with a button on the front and an LED to tell you it's on. hide it behind your speakers if you want to, but make it sound like the angels have descended and are singing a happy tune. and keep the prices down. i wonder if Hegel from Norway is as good as some claim (a good example)?