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.

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.

Over the years I've owned a couple of Coherence IIs as well as all of the iterations of the Synergy (I, II, IIi). Right now I'm quite impatiently awaiting the arrival of a Corus.

Guido's description is pretty much spot on and the last iterations of the Coherence and Synergy were just on the warm side of neutral. I was always a big fan of the Coherence and ultimately let mine go as I needed a pre with a home theater bypass input which could be selected by remote control (so that I could fully automate the system in my old house).

This was back in early 2008 and I looked at a number of preamps which were current at the time. I really wanted a Criterion, but the product wasn't shipping yet. I ultimately went a completely different route and picked up a VTL TL-7.5 Series II. While this unit solved my ergonomic issues it also showed me that the Coherence was limiting dynamics somewhat. While the Coherence was fully capable of reproducing a dynamic signal my feeling was that its rise time was a bit slow which made the leading edge of transients sound a bit muddy.

Don't get me wrong, the Coherence was an excellent preamp in its day, but has since been surpassed by a number of designs. I can't tell you how the Corus compares as I haven't received mine yet, but based on numerous conversations with Corus / Criterion owners (Guido included) it sounds as if the overall presentation has much improved over the previous designs. Since I was getting ready to pull the trigger on a pair of M925s I decided to order the Corus as well with the hope of a synergistic match between amps and pre.

As much as I love the Coherence and have very fond memories of it I would look to newer designs in order to take advantage of 15 years of progress in circuit and power supply design.

One interesting feature of Corus is that it is compatible with an upcoming external Rowland power supply based on supercapacitor technology to be called PSU. Yes, of course, PSU will add a fair chunk to the price of a Corus, but unlike the Criterion with its battery unit, PSU is completely optional and can power two devices at the same time (Corus and Aeris).

If my conjectures prove to be correct, PSU might further enhance authority and transient speed to Corus.... But until someone tries PSU out, my conjecture is only worth the electrons expended in displaying it.

Thank fully "supercapacitor" is not a new fangled nuveau-fizzy-marketing term.... it's a class of devices that combine quasi-battery energy density with quasi-capacitor charge/discharge cycling... Look them up on Wikipedia if interested.

G.

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....