Best phono stage balanced under $3000 used

The Clearaudio Balanced Reference fits your needs at used prices. The K&K and Ayre list new for less than $3,000. All of these will give you excellent, but not state of the art performance.

Throw some NOS Telefunkens and/or Siemens into the unit and the noise floor of the Rhea drops considerably. I agree the stock Sovteks are miserable. Unless I crank the gain and volume way up, my unit is rather quiet. Tubes add a sense of air, realism and palpabilty which will be absent from solid state phono amps.

K&K Audio sells a phono preamp kit for about $1500 which offers balanced as well as single ended topology. I own one. In my opinion, it is much better than the EAR 834p.
Perhaps you should consider the K&K kit; then take the money that remains in your budget and upgrade your cartridge. I suspect the improvement from those two purchases would exceed the improvement from any phono preamp you could buy for $3K.

There is also the Trumpet.

I agree with Cedar. The K&K is a couple of levels above the 834P.

Oz