I didn’t mention a dead short and was only referring to the two terminal impedance the coil of a cartridge sees. Any reference to ground be it real or virtual does not factor into the load seen by the coils. Surely there has to be an actual input impedance for a current amp and it has to be low otherwise the coils will not generate any current to amplify. I am not trying to get into an in depth analysis of how various transimpedance amplifiers work but address the general first order behavior of the system and believe that a cartridge operating into a ideal voltage amp behaves differently than the same cartridge into an ideal current amplifier primarily due to the fact that the loads are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Try placing a 5 Ohm resistor across the output of any LOMC cartridge and see what happens 😁
that depends on what load the input of the following stage gives.
If it is a voltage amplifier with 47kΩ, a 30Ω cartridge loaded by 5Ω it will be 17dB down. When you replace that 30Ω cart with a 2Ω cart the output will only be down 3dB. If it is a current amplifier with a 1Ω input impedance a 5Ω parallel load will lower the current into the 1Ω input node by1.6dB with both the 2Ω and the 30Ω cartridge. The absolute currents will be different for the 2Ω and 30Ω carts but the relationship of how the 5Ω load affects a 1Ω input impedance stays the same.
dave