@grey9hound This is not a bad place to ask about or talk about gear. If you search, you will find that this topic has been covered a lot.
Some suggestions for you...
At the lower end of your budget, the Parks Puffin is really quite good for the money and has tons of adjustments and Shannon is continually tweaking the firmware and adding features. It's a tweaker's dream, but may put some off because it injects digital into your analog chain.
The Musical Fidelity Nova Phonomena can be found used towards the lower end of your range and is very quiet and neutral and has a lot of loading and gain settings.
The two phono stages I own that are near the top of your budget are the Manley Chinook and Pass Labs XP-15. You should be able to find a Chinook under your budget, the XP-15 might stretch it a little.
The Chinook is tube based and is a little more dynamic than the XP-15, but also a little noisier. Which isn't to say that it's noisy, it's not and you won't hear it at all during playback and you can play around with tube rolling. It only has two gain settings, so not a lot of flexibility there, but it should work with most cartridges. Lots of loading settings.
The XP-15 is dead quiet, very neutral, and offers a lot of options for gain and loading settings.
I have personal experience with all of these and still own all of them except the Nova Phonomena. I had two at one time, so the fact that I no longer own them isn't due to lack of enjoyment, just that they were replaced by higher end units.
