TIME'S CELEBRATION: ORTOFON FIRST CENTURY ANNIVERSARY ! ! ! ! !

I personally would not pay $12K for a cartridge, but I don't think the idea is "beyond stupid".

Davey, The (all tube) Atma-sphere MP1 will work fine with cartridges down to around 0.2mV, with no significant noise penalty, and this is without a SUT.  Beyond that, there is more than one hybrid tube/solid state phono stage that will also work well.  I modified my own MP1 by converting the input phono voltage gain stage to a solid state/tube hybrid circuit.  As a result, I can deal with even an Ortofon MC2000 (.05mV output) with inaudible noise and with quite a bit of headroom (no SUT needed).  The MP1 is a fully balanced device, input to output.  This provides for quite a bit of noise cancellation.  I think it is unwise in this hobby to make sweeping generalizations unless one has actually done the work to support such.

Invictus, On VA, one of the inmates posted that with his SME V, the new Ortofon Century will give a resonant frequency of about 10Hz, smack in the middle of the desired range.  So maybe you ought to give it a thought for use with your SME V.  For me, with MC cartridges, it almost seems that my rating would be inversely proportional to voltage output, which is to say the lower the signal voltage output, the better the cartridge sounds in comparison to other models from the same maker or even across brands. And you don't necessarily need an all solid state phono stage to achieve low noise and high gain.