Discrete phono stage, single supply.

John Curl's legendary "JC-2" phono stage, used in the Mark Levinson phono preamp of the same name, was an all-discrete design. 40 years ago.

John Curl's legendary "Vendetta" phono stage, was a nearly all-discrete design. He used two opamps outside the signal path, to implement "DC servos" which nullify offset voltages. 33 years ago.

His phono stages that ship inside Parasound preamp products today, zero years ago, use all opamps. The only discretes are single-JFET current sources whose only purpose is to increase the opamps' output stage dc current.

But which is "sonically better" ? It's a matter of taste. You decide.
 
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Are discrete phono stages sonically better than ones with op amps?
Well I'd argue that a phono preamp isn't sonically anything, since its electronic, not acoustic, but either way the question is moot since it matters which discrete circuit and which opamp you are comparing - or do you mean which approach gives the absolute ultimate best performance? In that case you have to be clear how to measure what's "best" - and different people differ a lot in this.

There are many properties of a preamp that can matter (headroom, noise, linearity, cost, EMI-susceptibility, precision of RIAA response, output impedance, single-ended/balanced output, configurability of input impedance, portability, bandwidth/roofing filtering, probably a few more I can't recall), you have to figure out the relative importance of the properties to be able to define what "better" means to you, or define a minimum requirement for the important ones perhaps.

Both approaches, discrete and opamp, can lead to very good performance, and indeed sometimes a hybrid of discrete devices and opamps can be a real winner too.
 
If people want to play with cascoded germanium, here is a circuit that I've made, with excellent results, sonically and technically.
Now the pre was with a friend of mine and he is very happy! Far better (in his words) than other preamps he tested against, including commercial ones.
I recommend!
PS.: the input bootstrap 4u7 capacitor needs to be at 390R side (my drawing here show options).
Time for some measurements (in fact, it are save in my PC time ago, but now I see I not lost it ;-)
Shorted input:
Ge fono F9.png

The 1kHz residual are from the gig this time.
Inverse RIAA:
Ge fono F8.png

HD vs freq (sweep using inverse RIAA):
Ge fono F6.png

Results from my schema quoted here.

The actual owner continues loving it. Great sound.