[audio bill]

Sorry to hear about your Lyra Delos, unfortunately such accidents are part of life as an audiophile. Hope your ankle surgery and recovery goes well. Now on to your questions, hope I can be of some help.

I don't have any first hand experience with the C1100 but it's MC gain of 60dB for a MC with 0.3mV output along with 15dB from the line stage would generally be considered enough preamplifier gain for most setups. There are many variables though including amplifier sensitivity and gain as well as speaker sensitivity so it can be difficult to predict. I think the use of a 0.3mV output MC would be likely to work fine from a gain standpoint with the C1100.

As far as your second question I'm sorry to say that my expectations are not as positive. Most Koetsu carts have relatively low compliance and are best matched to medium to high mass arms in order to keep the arm/cart resonance in the desired range. I'd have some concern that the combo with your lower mass arm could likely result in resonance issues. In addition I do think that jumping up to a Koetsu would be going above the level of the Pro-ject arm so that you wouldn't be able to get the performance that the Koetsu is capable of. Higher performance carts like Koetsu are more demanding of the matching tonearm and I think in this case the arm would be the limiting factor of such a potential pairing.

Good luck with whatever you decide, and of course if you could arrange to borrow a similar cartridge to try that would be best. However most of us are not in such a position and cartridges are not commonly lent for audition by most dealers with the potential for damaging them.