"balls" in this case means gusto, drive, dynamics and power. these are
definitely qualites that can be associated with phono preamps. having
owned many that were somewhat weak or anemic sounding I wanted to put a
list together of some that are the contrary.
With many phono sections the trick is to **not** use a cartridge that is at the lower limits of the phono section's gain limitations. Then almost any phono section will have what you are looking for.
Bonus: if the phono section is stable and has good overload margin, you will hear a significant reduction of ticks and pops, as many of those are caused by oscillation and RF overload caused by the inductance of the cartridge and the capacitance of the cable acting as a tuned RF circuit.
A way to tell that the phono section has stability problems is if you have to load your LOMC cartridge to get it to sound right (IOW the stock 47Kohms should be fine). The loading detunes the RF circuit and prevents it from injecting RFI into the preamp. But this comes at a price- the cantilever is stiffer, meaning that it will not track as easily. So a stable preamp is important!