When Marc Phillips of Part-Time Audiophile opened the boxes for a Rowland preamp and power amp, he lifted each one out with one hand and thought the shipment had been split. Roy Gregory of The Audio Beat says nothing in high-end audio can match Rowland for style and external quality, and he pictured the Daemon at home on a counter at Watches of Switzerland. The Model 125's case is milled from a solid block of aluminum. Inside, Rowland's circuits are balanced, which means the music travels as two mirror-image signals and any noise common to both cancels out. Robert Deutsch of Stereophile noted in 1995 that Jeff Rowland was one of the first designers to promote fully balanced circuitry. Anthony Kershaw of Audiophilia heard a liquid, smooth treble from the Continuum S2 and called it typical of the Rowland house sound. Rowland suits listeners who want a quiet, powerful amplifier in a beautiful case.

The Model 125 is the way in. It is a class D amplifier, which is why it is so small and light, and it drove every pair of speakers Phillips tried. If you need more, a pair can be bridged into monoblocks, which Rowland suggests for demanding 4-ohm speakers. Its partner is the Capri S2-SC preamp, which takes Rowland's HP phono card, and Phillips counts that card among the best inboard phono stages he has heard. For one box, the Continuum S2 combines the Capri circuit with 400 watts a channel. Phillips ran one with very efficient Volti Razz horns, and Volti's Greg Roberts told him his ears would pop before the speakers would. At the top is the Daemon integrated. Gregory calls its amplification stage "sonically and musically superb" and found it happiest with wide-bandwidth speakers that are not too sensitive. It sounded more open to him on couplers such as HRS Nimbus pads.

Jeff Rowland began with custom designs in the 1970s. In 1983 Roger West of Sound Lab asked him for an amplifier powerful and stable enough to drive the new A1 electrostatic speaker, and the WL-500 he built led to his breakthrough. That was the Model 7 monoblock, which made its debut at CES in Las Vegas in 1985 driving Dave Wilson's WAMM system. Hifi-Advice recounts that Wilson, reviewing for The Absolute Sound, judged it and Krell's KMA-200 the state of the art in solid-state amplification. A decade later Deutsch reviewed the Model 2 and called it "the best, most natural-sounding amplifier I've had a chance to evaluate." Rowland says each product is the work of a single designer, and the company is based in Colorado Springs. It moved early into class D, and the company's Lucien Pichette recalls Jeff Rowland saying that "the module is just a piece of the puzzle," with the power supply and input transformers doing the rest.