New preamp or up grade my cartridge and or phono amp?

Soix, ehem. I don’t own a discrete linestage. All my preamplifiers contain phono sections. For that combo , you pay more. And none of them ( I have 3) cost me more than $4K, all purchased second hand.

These days, what we call a preamplifier is a linestage with a bunch of selectable inputs and optionally a balance, phase, or mono control. The linestage usually adds only a little gain to its input signal, which emanates from a phono stage, CDP, or other high level source. In fact, the linestage needs an attenuator to throw away excessive gain from input sources. If the linestage is passive it adds no gain at all. I think it’s no trick to make a very low distortion, wide bandwidth linestage, and linestages need not be hyper-expensive. In fact, the most important part of a linestage is a high quality attenuator.