What's A Good Upgrade From A Manley Steelhead?

It has been brought to my attention that I mis-spoke in my post and am unable to edit my post. The Allnic H-5500 was bested by the Allnic H-3000 that I had purchased. The H-6500 is a Preamp and not a Phonostage. 

In describing the H-6500 as a "preamp", I presume you mean either that it is a full function preamplifier with a built in phono section or that it is a linestage, with no phono section. (You must be young; in the good old days there were very few standalone phono stages, and the word "preamplifier" assumed a linestage with built in phono stage.)  If the H-6500 to which you refer is a linestage (only), then from what I know of Allnic nomenclature, wouldn't it be called "L-6500"? Since Allnic do not currently market a full function preamplifier, that would seem to be the case.  On their website, I do see L-6500 but not any H-6500.  The H-5500 appears to be the current latest revision of the H-1201 and H-1202.  I ask because somewhere else I was led into this same quandary regarding the possible existence of an H-6500 phono stage.

Although I am not an ardent admirer of tube rolling as a way of upgrading performance, I do use Siemens CCa's in my Steelhead.  Do I think they made a big difference? No, but they are "nice".

I just checked what I have for tubes in the Steelhead:

Amperex 6dj8 orange globe x2 for gain

I bought a quad of TUNG-SOL 5687WA Blackplate Big D getter but they created some noise, so I switched back in the JAN NOS GE 7044. My understanding is that there's no technical reason why the output buffers should impact the sound, so there's little point in spending a lot of money on those. 

@rooze  : I can see that you are way demanding with that " bass " in the PS Audio unit.

Fremer was using the WA  ALEXX paired with Dartzeel Monoblocks and top of the line Dartzeel phonolinepreamp, no tubes at all an in true high resolution system and I think that the Stellar made a great job down there that any Allnic/Manley/VAC or tube unit can touch it.

As the Dartzeel or the CH the PS Audio phono stage is not perfect but for the " huge " 2.5K price tag you can't ask for more.

R.

While someone else mentioned that the Steelhead uses a transistor per channel as a constant current source (CCS), it is my belief that the amplification stage is actually a hybrid cascode, with a transistor serving as one half of the cascode circuit.  Using a cascode, to my knowledge of tube electronics, is the only way they could be getting up to 65db of phono gain.  It is also possible that the cascode is derived from single sections of two of these high transconductance dual triodes, with the transistor serving as CCS only.  But since Manley do not release a schematic to anyone, this is pure speculation.  What is not speculation is that you cannot get 65db of phono gain with merely a 6DJ8 type tube.  I think it's a cascode driving a White cathode follower (mentioned by Evanna Manley in the 6Moons article) which drives either the attenuator, if you use it as a full preamp, or driving the external linestage. If output goes through the attenuator, then the attenuator drives yet another White cathode follower, which drives that output.