I had the Herron, and loved it..... ended up selling it for the Pass XP25 (not only because I’m not ready in life to relax my ear that much, but mostly for the easy of changing cartridge loading/gain without pulling the rack out from the wall to access the loading pins, especially frequent with 2 TTs or tone arms). I’ll may go back to the Herron later. Both Herron and Pass seem to work well with my pre-amp, Cello Palette, which does have 3 internal gain settings as well as balanced output (I’m running 20 foot ICs to my amps that live across the room with the speakers)... but that is indeed vintage, so... no dice.
Cello Palette goes for over $12k today.
They made very cute CELLO Etude which is passive and goes for about $1k.
There is something similar in these knobs between Pass and Cello :))
Nelson Pass stuff is great, love his preamps (passive and active), hope to try his Pass Aleph Ono phono stage and Pass Aleph P preamp soon.