Phono Pre-amp with XLR

Audio Research PH-2 was a great true balanced in to out phono stage.
Rare. $2,500 new.
I have only seen three in ten years here, and one of those i bought.
It is Solid state, but is a better than average item with a good power condioned A/C input.
Mine is not for sale. (the best advertising a product can get, NONE FOR SALE!!)

Depending on your budget you should have a look at either Blue amp or the BMC phono amps. Both brands are non tube though. As far as I know both of these brands make true balanced phono amps. Many brands do give the option of XLR in/out but often the amp it self operates non balanced.

I am using a VPI Superscoutmaster/rim drive with a balanced XLR junction box to an Ayre preamp. The result is an absolute quiet background and clear, clean signal. My LP's are as quiet as CD's. No hiss, hum, - nothing even with the volume control raised.

right here

http://cgi.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/auc.pl?preaphon&1320714940&auc

As long as you understand that the type of input or output jack (RCA vs XLR) makes very little difference per se. What I think you want is a balanced phono stage that truly processes the phono signal in balanced mode. Such a preamp will typically provide XLRs in and out, but some of them also provide RCA inputs, for tonearms that have only RCA terminations and customers who are not competent to change over from RCA to XLR. A single-ended phono stage will almost never have XLR inputs but might have XLR outputs as an option. Sometimes XLR outputs on an SE stage actually sound less good than the native RCA outputs, because to generate the balanced output signal, the phono output has to be processed one more time, either by going thru a transformer or thru a buffer of some kind. Maybe you know all this, and if so, I apologize for the pedantry.