Help me find a pre-amp

Well Snowdog, we have these people in common.  I bought nearly all of my gear from John & I pop in to see him when I’m up in SEA.  Stuart picked up my T7s from SoCal and upgraded them in his workshop.  So you understand these are unique loudspeakers for everything I have into them and how sonically excellent they are for the $$.

John indeed recommended the same gear to me, but I would like to hear it first.  He has nothing to demo.

BTW, I’ve kind of dismissed Cary bc -rightly or wrongly, I assume a lot of my $$ would be going into phono stage related build. I’ll never see ROI from that.

Yup Conrad Johnson 

A lot of good suggestions.

In my experience the Backert sounded like AI - very dynamic, but artificial sounding.  A sax should sound like a sax and the difference between a piano, harp and harpsichord is easily confused with the pre.

I passed on the Pre in favor of the Aesthetics Calypso...which gets the timbre and dynamics right...as did the Atma Pre - just not as deep a stage.

Another recommendation for Backert Labs.  I recently purchased the Rhumba Extreme and a sax sounds very much like a sax on my system.  It's also very responsive to tube rolling.