I don't have the magazine in front of me but the undithered 1 KHz sine wave at - 90 dbfs looked like a garbled mess and in the same issue the Bryston DAC measured incredibly well.
Also JA commented along the lines that the noise was so high that DSD or 24 bit wouldn't be more resolving than 16 bit.
I agree his response was interesting.
One of the British hifi magazines (I think) did some measurements of the SME 9" and 12" tonearms. I lost the link in a hardrive crash, but I remember someone posted the findings with graphs in VinylAsylum a while ago. Searching VA is a nightmare so I wasn't able to find the thread.
The XOno sounds like good suggestion. IME having a phono with lots of different loading options is a good thing, as slight changes in loading can cause quite audible aberrations in frequency response.