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.
Do you see how this above does not jive with this:
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.
Transimpedance phono sections have a dynamic load whereas a resistor is a static load. This is because the so-called 'virtual ground' (which will be 0 Ohms) occurs where the feedback resistor of an opamp meets the input resistance, which in this case will the cartridge itself.
At any rate, Moncreif threw off his numbers by using a 5 Ohm load, since that is not only not a real-world value that no-one would ever use, but is also one that would significantly decrease the output of any LOMC cartridge to the point that its output would be unusable (which is why its not real world...). Keep in mind that transimpedance phono sections didn't exist back then. As I mentioned previously, if he really wanted to make his point valid he needed to show the results using real world loads that are actually in use.