corus vs coherence 2

Plataman, I am very familiar with Corus, as I own the Rowland Criterion, which shares very similar audio circuit and AC power supply. I have not experienced the Coherence series, but I am familiar with the general evolution of the Rowland sound over the last couple of decades.

Rowland has evolved over the last 25 years from an essentially warm sound with a slight golden glow and a moderate transparency, to a much more neutral sound that is however more revealing of inner detail without ever falling onto the analitical side.

So, it really depends on what kind of musicality you are seeking.... Romantic with a touch of pastel, or more lifelike and -- at least for me -- even more toe-tapping emotional.

One of the unique things that you would find with Corus is that it is almost insensitive to power cords. With its sibling Criterion, I have not experienced any performance difference among any power cords I fed it with: stock, Furutech Evo II and Flux, Shunyata King Cobra CX, Aural Symphonics.... Oh yes, these cords influence greatly a lot of components, but not Corus/Criterion.

G.

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.

Very good points French_Fries. In the case of Rowland Corus/implementation with batteries -- under the name Criterion -- it was withdrawn about a year ago... It did sell for a 5K to 6K price premium over Corus. In my system, Criterion seems invariant to AC vs battery operation for all PCs that I have applied to it, hence it would have little advantage over Corus. On the other hand, I have listened to at least one system where Criterion on battery sounded very much cleaner than when it was served by AC... So, seems that the answer is, as always... It depends! G.