Jeff Rowland Continuum S2 Integrated review by Roy Gregory at TheAudioBeat.com...

Hi Allen, Continuum S2 prices ppear to be as follows:

Continuum S2: $9500.00
Continuum S2 with phono card: $9850.00
Continuum S2 with DAC card: $9950.00


Saluti, GUido
 
Mike...when will you be receiving the S2 for demo? Are you demoing any other JRDG equipment or just the S2? Thx
 
Jeff Rowland Continuum S2 Integrated review by Roy Gregory at TheAudioBeat.co...

cmalak said:
Mike...when will you be receiving the S2 for demo? Are you demoing any other JRDG equipment or just the S2? Thx
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Cyril, it arrives Monday. Just the S2. I really want a integrated for downstairs. Stereo/preamp at most. Monos on the floor with the kids around isn't ideal. The footprint of the S2 is ideal. Spec wise it looks really good too. Ballsy power and very quick (high damping factor). Downside is the 1000 hour break in. The one I'm demoing has the phonostage. I didn't want the DAC anyway since the Lumin is my main source.


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I find that the DAC in the S-2 is not only good.. It is a fantastic DAC for that kind of money.. And it could happen that it is far better than a lot of external and build in DAC's out there.. That is Michaels and mine experience.. Try it out :)
 
High praise - I will have to try it! Pity a phono stage can't be fitted alongside the DAC, but streaming takes precedence for me. At the prices quoted it makes sense to get both DAC and phono stage just in case.
 
Raidho said:
I find that the DAC in the S-2 is not only good.. It is a fantastic DAC for that kind of money.. And it could happen that it is far better than a lot of external and build in DAC's out there.. That is Michaels and mine experience.. Try it out :)
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I agree. The Capri preamp with DAC/Phono option is the alternative if you want to go separate. Capri + 525 stereoamp is actually less expensive than the S2.
 
Interesting Hyperion. That raises the question of what's best - the Capri S2 & 525 or Continuum S2. The Continuum looks to have the power advantage, plus you don't have to buy interconnects, and it's a one box solution which is very attractive.
 
I'd be very interested in the comparison to the separates also. The S2 works great w Raidho's. I've only got about 250 hrs on mine.

I got the phono board in mine.
 
Guys, you can buy both cards and swap them out as system needs change. I think the DAC is $400-500 and the phono card about $350. It's not a 2 second job, but it can be accomplished with a little effort.

And keep in mind that Roy Gregory was also smitten with the phonostage too.


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Oh and be sure to set the jumpers so that the display goes dark after 10 seconds or so. Roy Gregory is right - it does sound better with the display turned off.
 
Rufus McDufus said:
Interesting Hyperion. That raises the question of what's best - the Capri S2 & 525 or Continuum S2. The Continuum looks to have the power advantage, plus you don't have to buy interconnects, and it's a one box solution which is very attractive.
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I haven't compared these options side by side. In the end it might be a choice inbetween convenience and flexiblity as I would expect the performance to be close.
 
All, the admittedly conservative 1K break-in estimate comes at least in part from me. It is based on a 3-day long exposure to Continuum S2, and is therefore somewhat conjectural and extrapolative in nature.

My general experience with break-in, including that for class D amps, is that many devices continue to develop and sweeten for the first thousand hours or so, with the first few hundred hours being potentially painful to bear. Amusingly enough, some of the newer class D amps like my Rowland M925s make easily enjoyable music within hours of "first sound"... They deliver islands of progressively higher sonic refinement quite early in the game, interspersed with correspondingly shorter and shallower performance dips. The bulk of non linear break-in seems to abate by about 700 hours, after which progress assumes asymptotic behavior. At the 1K hours boundary I thought that the highly involving sound was the product of complete breakin, but evolution actually continued very slowly until M925 grazed the 1800 hours mark.

When I listened to CS2 at RMAF 2013, I observed that its sound was opening up rapidly over the 3 days of the show, and was quite enchanting by the 3rd day. However, based on past experience, I ventured to suspect that the integrated in the Rowland suite, being relatively new off the factory floor, may still have been delivering a performance which may have not told the entire story about its full capabilities... Hence my conservative break-in conjecture for Continuum S2.

Regards, G.

Guido
 
Hey Mike,

Next time you are talking to Rowland, complain for me about the amazingly bad/cheap remote that comes w the S2.

Hey it's a lower level product so I understand cutting costs, especially in a non-performance way, but when I asked my dealer about buying a nice remote that I assume comes their top of the line preamp, he said I couldn't buy it. Weird!
 
Jock, I suspect that there may be a matter of compatibility of the IR codes used by the Continuum S2 remote with the Corus remote, more than n issue of lack of availability of the Corus remote itself. You might be able to source a 3rd party programmable IR remote, and configure it to function as CS2 remote. I can inquire with the factory.

Guido
 
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