I have been busily selling off my worldly (non audio) possessions, and am within arm's reach of making a bid on the an Audio Research LS9. The seller sent me pictures last night:
I love the Smurfy power cord. In some ways, the LS-9 is a strange choice. It's a solid state preamp made by a company renowned for their tube products. In spite of its excellent I/O, it has a fairly humble feature set and (from what I've been able to gather) isn't terribly popular with AR loyalists. That said, I have found no other preamp that does what I want as well as it, for under a grand. I briefly considered bidding on this sexy looking blanced passive pre, but the lack of a second set of balanced outs and dual volume knobs (a pet peeve of mine) made me deciding against it pretty easy.
The devil's advocate preamp here is this LS2B Mk II, which is nearly the same price and has almost the same I/O as the LS-9. The major difference here is that it's a hybrid tube/FET pre, and has the associated size, power consumption and heat dissipation. It's also an older design, but I'm not sure how much that matters. For me, the sonic differences between the units would have be pretty staggering for me to choose the LS2B over the LS9.