Steelhead as a preamp?

Rloggie, I owned the Steelhead for several years and, during that time, occasionally ran the Steelhead as a full-function preamp in addition to using it solely as a phono stage into a separate line-stage preamp. Whereas I regard the Steelhead as a world-class phono stage, I would characterize the line stage aspect of its performance as very competent but short of the performance of a SOTA line stage.

In my system, the Steelhead sounded more "tubey" than I prefer with bass that was a bit "wooly" and sound that was a bit less transparent and less extended at the frequency extremes than a first-class line stage.

So, in short, while I think the line stage in the Steelhead is very good, IMO you can improve on its performance significantly (and at significant cost) if you pair it with a first-class line stage.

By the way, I agree with the comments in support of the Steelhead's MM inputs. I experimented running my Dynavector XV-1s into the MC inputs (which routes the signal through the autoformers) and into the MM inputs. I found the sound through the MM inputs to be more transparent as noted above. As long as you have sufficient gain using the Steelhead's active gain stages, I too would recommend using the MM inputs over the MC inputs.