Tube or solid state phono stage?

Zesto is great gear.  If I went to a tube phono stage it would be a Zesto.   George and Carolyn Counnas are some of the nicest people you will ever deal with in this hobby.  Excellent customer service and equipment 

Not sure you can generalize - I use two solid state phono stages and one tube based one and all sound quite good. The best is a solid state classic - the John Curl Vendetta which is the best I have heard although we ran it against a last model Herron VTPH - 2A with which it was neck and neck.

My tube stage is a CJ Premier 15 and although an older model it also is a good sounding phono stage.

I’m intrigued by the balanced inputs of the BAT. Does anyone know if that adds anything to the sound quality from a turntable input?

@stewartgr I do! We've been making balanced tube preamps (with balanced tube phono sections) longer than anyone else worldwide.

The thing that balanced line is supposed to bring to the table is immunity to cable artifacts (and also immunity to ground loops). If you've ever auditioned cables and heard a difference you know what I'm talking about. To do this you have to support the balanced line standard also known as AES48. Its handy also if the source is also very low impedance.

In the case of a LOMC cartridge, both aspects are there. So the real issue is the tonearm cable if your phono section has a balanced input. I think we can all agree that if there is any place in the system where the cable has to get it right, its the tonearm cable since it will not matter how good your preamp, amps and speakers are, nothing downstream can fix a problem introduced upstream.

In a nutshell you get a signal from the phono that is more accurate and natural.

That weird ground wire that no other single-ended source seems to need goes away; that is used when you are connecting a balanced source to a single-ended input. Instead the ground connection is the shield of the cable and is tied to pin 1 of the XLRs of each channel. This works very well with arms that use a 5 pin DIN connector and its also possible if the tonearm has RCA outputs with a ground post (we make a special cable for that but any competent technician can too).

The tonearm cable does not have to be expensive! All it needs to be is low capacitance and built correctly.