New Rowland Criterion 2-chassis battery pre

Nice pictures of CES Guido. Thanks for the link! I took my Criterion up to a friends over the weekend for a listen in his system. (Wadia 922/931 fed by 781i, Rowland 312 into Aerial 20t MKII via Silent source cables everywhere. The room was fully treated, but on wood upper floor.) The first listen was obviosly direct digital to amp for about 5-7 cuts. Then swapped after pre had been on for about 6 hrs for a listen. Upper mid to beyond took on a more solid feel not a thickening at all. The background stayed pitch black. Bass got just a tiny bit more authority, but the biggest effect was two fold. First the overal sound took on a sort of Majestic feeling. Yes, hard to explain but I think the bit of extra dynamics and sensity of the upper end gave it this feeling. Second was when huge and/or very loud uber dynamic swings were fed thru the stream, the pre kept it all together without even the time to sigh about the load! Now, I must tell you, if you haven't already figured it out, that the floors and walls were VERY active by now and feeding back from this energy. Yes the 312 can provide, but it needs unrestricted wall juice and needs to stay away from it's upper output limit due to the hardness and tendancy to start falling apart just before the thermal overload protection kicks in. We were listening that loud!I've said it before that the 312 is not the last word in low freq extention and dynamic cpability. Having heard it pushed hard in this system I still feel the same. It has tremendous transparency, and the imaging is spectacular. Look, it's not a pair of 200 lb mono's! It's a 65 lb stereo amp, that poud for pound kicks ass. It's not cheap, but it does more than most any amp I know in its price range. Sorry, got sidetracked and off subject. Just wanted to address some of the 312 amp comments on this and other threads I'm on. Anyway, going back to the Citerion...Taking it out of the chain was imeaditealy noticed. It was like "Hey, where did the majesty go?" There's probably a better pre out there, but at what price and will it be unaltering of the signal?

In my loudspeakers the low frequency of my 312 is hair-raising.

I still have one stereo GamuT D200 MKIII. As we known Gamut is a wonderfull device. At least more or less, I guess.

Side by side, in my set up, I gave C to GamuT and A+ to the 312 in the low frequency region.

So I think it's very good.

David, I do admit freely that there are a lot of amps with greater authority than 312. My old Rowland 7M monoblocks for example, had comfortably greater authority than 312. . . after all, 312 peaks at 40 amps for a fraction of a second, while the old 7Ms peak at 50 Amps continuous. Having said that, I really would love for you to visit my system and bring your Wadia player along for the ride. . . I am not at all experiencing shiness in the bass region, on the contrary. My room is relatively dampened. It may be a matter of different speakers, CDp, and cabling. . . or simply different personal preferences. And while I do listen to music at relatively high volume, I probably never get 312 to near clipping situations.

I found your observations about Criterion sound extremely a propos. . . 'majestic' is definitely one of its sonic attributes. . . . and it is rather unflappable even when it yields very high dynamic swings.

I found that 312 is very sensitive to power cords. . . including what it does in the bass region. This far, some of the very deepest and cleanest bass has been with Shunyata King Cobra power cords, and Furutech High Performance ICs and speaker wires. I have further found that good power distribution also contributes to a tuneful, deep, and linear bass performance.

Guido, Did you get a delivery date on the Corus yet?

No, I have no delivery date on Corus yet. I will check again this week. Guido