...what about manley labs steelhead or lamm lp2?
These are something different.They do a lot of things right (tone, staging, swing, body, size, time differences...) but of course it depends on you what you expect and demand. The Steelhead is interesting, there is much worse out there. The Lamm LP2 is a unit you will only know how good it is when you know what others do wrong. Lamm offers that one in a - non promoted series for the fanatic low output MC owner - high gain version, 70dB without extra pricing instead of 58dB.... 'nuff said :-)