Jeff Rowland to what?

Hello Jimmy!

Your golden beauties are not Rowland Moons.... They are Rowland Model 7 monoblocks *Grins!*

A JRDG M625 S2 stereo like Richard's, or a pair of the brand new M535 bridged amps would be more than worthy successors to your classic Rowland monos.

Saluti, Guido

Hi Jimmy, M625 S2 might appear once a while on the pre-owned market…. But M535 is brand new, so it is unlikely to pop up used for quite a spell.

The good news is that M535 is reasonably priced at $5900 per chassis. Depending on your speakers, you can drive them with one single unit, and perhaps later add a second one for bridged operations if you want even more authority.

In stereo mode, M535 yields 250W into 8 Ohms, doubling to 500W into 4 Ohms.  In bridged mode, each unit outputs 900W.

G

Hi Richard, as many already pointed out, exceeding the performance of the amp you have without "amping up" the investment very significantly might be a tall order. As you enjoy the sound of M625 S2 but you would like more power, I warmly recommend the Rowland M725 S2 class A/B monos or the Rowland M825 stereo, or the M925 monos. Outside the Rowland World, I might look at Solution amps.... Quite expensive, but yield a musicality that also meets my sound concept.

But there is something you can do to enhance the music of your system while keeping M625 S2, Corus, and the Aeris DAC.... Last week I have installed the recently released Rowland Power Storage Unit (PSU). As I mentioned via email, this is an external full chassis power supply based on ultra-capacitors. It is designed to feed simultaneously Aeris and Corus with pure DC, and takes them off the AC mains grid. I had heard glowing third party reports on it, but I was a little skeptical... While I have not had ultra-capacitors in my system, I understood the concept, and have had battery powered pre-amplifcation before.... And the performance difference between batteries and AC was very subtle.

But when I connected PSU into the Rowland Aeris DAC I realized that batteries supplies and PSU are totally different animals... The performance enhancement is simply staggering, even on my system which I already considered wonderful, where Aeris feeds directly a pair of Rowland M925 4-chassis monoblocks into Vienna Acoustics Die Muzik. The enhancement is apparent from first activation for all audible parameters I can think of, and is followed by a rapid evolution lasting perhaps 200 hours, which pushes performance even futher.

I will soon create a dedicated thread on PSU with a lot more detail.

Guido

Hello @gareneau, indeed PSU is quite transformational. I suspect that given the high caliber of Richard's electronics and speakers, a PSU would yield significantly more benefits than a power amp change. Fact is that Richard already has Aeris as well as Corus.... And one single PSU would enhance the performance of both of them... Even though I only have Aeris but not Corus, The enhancement that PSU made in my own system is far from being subtle, or even moderate.

G.