Phono Preamp

I wouldn’t drop ~ 3K on a Herron when running a 1600 turntable/arm/cart package, just saying. Others like the EAR or JLTi might be a more reasonable fit, still leaving room for growth with the crucial table/cart upgrade.

My opinion is that an upper level phono stage will still extract far more information than a low level unit.  Granted a medium quality turntable is not going to give you all that you can expect, but the capabilities of the phono stage will not choke out what you do extract.  

If I recall, the OP here was willing to spend a decent amount on a turntable.  Assuming he purchases something pre owned and in nice shape, he can get a lot of bang for his buck with his budget.  If I were doing the same thing, I'd put as much as possible into the phono stage and not be saving money there.

Herron.  I have the phono pre for a year and the line pre for 100 hours.  Incredible.

I'm not sure the JLTi has to take a back seat to the Herron. The thread which got me looking at the JLTi was a shootout conducted  and attended by several other audiophiles, including Jay @ Audio Revelation. They all concluded that the JLTi was the best of the several they tried...all much more expensive than the JLTi. Jay subsequently began to sell the JLTi because of it. That thread is at least 10 yrs old now. That said, I have not heard the Herron nor do I know if it was included in the shootout. IIRC, it beat a Whest which was all the rave in a stereophile review that year.  But again, I'm going from memory.

The interesting thing about the Whest line up is that the units James built 10 years ago are far different than the latest designs.  If you look up threads on them, a guy named DCarol had several versions and kept moving up the line.  He got to the Whest PS.30 RDT SE and was floored at how good it was and in fact he did an evening with two other friends who brought over very expensive units from Boulder and if I recall, Avid?  The two friends sold their preamps and bought PS.30 RDT SE's.   DCarol ordered the Mark V Reference dual independent chassis mono phono stages from Whest (like around $18K) and later posted that those units took things up to some unheard of new level.  He would not sell his PS.30 RDT SE, he held on to it.   
That was a few years ago.  James told me that the 2019 build of the PS.30 RDT SE is multiple steps up from the earlier one DCarol is using.  This latest version uses the fully discreet front end of the PS.40 RDT, the same dual toroid transformers of the 40 with an elevated voltage rail, a full suspension chassis for the main boards as used in the 40 and Titan, the Titan wire harness and zero floating voltage boards (if I got that part right).
All of the capacitors are Clarity Caps, which are very high end hand made (Bryston uses the Clarity Caps in their amps too).
If you want to see beautifully laid out circuit boards, the best I have seen anyway, do some Google images on Whest phono stages....  gorgeous stuff.