Ortofon carts are too hot for my phono preamp?

viridian said it best.

The Ortofon Black produces 5mV at a stylus velocity of 5 cm/sec.  The Avid Pulsus phono stage provides 48db gain on its MM inputs.  48db gain is roughly a 250X voltage gain. So the output of the Pulsus would be about 1.25V.  That per se is not going to overload your linestage high level inputs which ought to be capable of tolerating it. The question is what is the overload margin of the Avid Pulsus inputs on MM.  Which is to ask how much signal voltage above 5mV is needed to overload the circuit.  Usually phono stages can have a better overload margin on their MM inputs compared to the MC inputs of the same unit, but I cannot find the overload specs for the Pulsus. You might ask your dealer or Avid whether the 2M Black, a very popular cartridge, might overload the MM inputs. But my guess would be no. And of course all that other stuff mentioned by Viridian is worth thinking about. I don't recommend increasing VTF by as much as 0.5g on a permanent basis, if that increase leads to VTF higher than the upper value given by Ortofon for that cartridge.

Thanks all. Check out these measurements:

https://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/index.php/vinyl-lp/25-cartridges/174-ortofon-2m-bronze-2m-black.html?start=3

They measure the output of the Bronze at 7.9 and the Black at 8.6.  Those are pretty hot, yes?  It may vary by individual cart.  

Also, I have the bronze and the black mounted on different TTs and they both display this issue with the Pulsus.  The Pulsus is otherwise a super nice phono pre, which is why I would like to keep using it.

So there is no reasonable way to tame the output of the cartridges?

Actually, the math above was helpful.  I just set inputs on the preamp to 2.8v - up from 2.0. If the Bronze and the Black are really closer to 8mV then 2.0 was too low. 

Checking now to see if there is any improvement.