I had the same predicament (sans the MuFi stage). I finally had narrowed it down to:
- Cary
- Mapletree
- Hagerman Cornet2
- Bottlehead
As much as I enjoy my Ear Purist amp, I was not quite sold on the Mapletree. Bottlehead has a great price, but I thought I could get better performance elsewhere (maybe not, I'm not positive). Plus, the constant current source is a $75 upgrade to the Bottlehead, while it's built into the base cornet2. Cary looks fine, but lacked extensive feedback on how people like it. The cornet2's B+ is tube rectified, which is also something I wanted.
After scouring around looking for some reviews, I kept ending up at the cornet2. I just got the last of the parts today for it, except the chassis. I have a nice graybox from lansing, but it's a bit large. I'm thinking perhaps of going the Bottlehead/Welborne style instead. Or I might just built it in a standard aluminum chassis base from hammond and call it industrial. I can always recase it later if it's as good as I am hoping.
I was going to build the bugle first, as a sort of inexpensive phonostage for a reference point. It is supposed to be one of the best SS phonostages you can get for under $600, and costs something like $80 to build. But as good as it is supposed to be, the cornet2 is supposed to be better by a large margin, and actually it seems to be closer to the trumpet than the bugle in performance. $1000 to buy it built, or $350-$600 or so to DIY, depending on how far you go with the parts. I'm going mostly stock, except for subbing the Auricaps as noted my Jim, and using Multicap RTX for the output caps. I also have the Auricaps for that position, for comparison.