Dear @tablejockey.
The claim was not mine. There are certainly many compromises that need to be made in a commercial design required to sell for $300. However, the measured performance is remarkably good for a unit of this price- equivalent to or better than many that are far more expensive, and the subjective listening tests were extremely positive.
As Bruno Putzeys famously wrote, " the problem is not that there is too much negative feedback, but there is too little... This design was implemented to do exactly that- correct for there being " too little feedback", and it was deliberately intended to make a frontal attack on the usual audiophile tenets in an area- MC phono preamp design- that is notoriously difficult to do well.