Reasonably priced 2K Phono Preamp?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and recommend something from space tech laboratory found at space-tech-lab.com. ive never heard their phono stages but i recently bought a little tube preamp line stage from them for a temporary piece just until i found THE preamp i really wanted. well...this little preamp was $300 new and blew the DOORS off my audio research sp9mkII and my morrison ELAD which gets such astonishing reviews at audioreview. i did an a/b comparison with all of them and i sold everything but the space-tech. the rest of my system consists of a vt100mkII, 777es, acoustat m3s, oracle delphi and the space tech keeps up with all of those pieces. it's really outstanding and i'm looking in to their phono stages right now. i can barely wait! i'm frothing.

Audio research PH3 SE version can't be beat from all the many, many, many reviews i've read. stereophile rated A, hybrid design and if you can find them used (rare) they go from $1,500-$1,600. if you find one for that price and dont want to buy let me know and i'll take it.

pctower: i had the sonic frontiers phono one and wasn't too crazy about it. how is the sf phono1 se version different and is it drastically so?
thanks