Pre-Amp sound similar to Conrad Johnson

I had the same issues I believe you are having with the CJ pre. They had the warmest sweetest midrange but to me sounded a bit slow anf muddy. The best compromises I have found are Blue Circle (musical with detail) and BAT (warm with speed). Good luck!

You might also want to look into the Atma Sphere preamps. I understand the less expensive one is a relative bargain.

I assume you are talking about the CJ ART unit as that is a transconductance amplifier? We build a unit that uses a fully balanced folded cascode transconductance amplifier using no global feedback, but done in FETs instead of tubes....