Hi Andy,
That little circuit looks easy to build. Have you heard one? One of my earliest projects was a single transistor (BC109?) head amp circuit in one of the hifi mags of the day powered by a PP3 batt. I tried it against the Ortofon MCA76 and it was lively and gave enough gain but was noisy (hiss) and rough sounding. So would that modern Jfet be good enough (showing my ignorance of modern devices here
) or would it just be another fun project capable of comparison maybe to the built in MC gain in some integrated amps?