Phono preamp or SUT for low output moving coil

@viridian Thank you for the information.  Good to know. 

It's very difficult to set a firm upper limit for the internal impedance of an LOMC cartridge that you want to work "well" with a current driven phono stage. This is because each brand of current driven phono stage will present a different input impedance, which is always going to be above zero ohms, the ideal value for current drive. But you cannot have a true zero ohm input impedance, because that is a short circuit to ground. So each matchup between cartridge and current drive phono stage is different in terms of loading the stage. A decent rule of thumb is to use cartridges with internal impedance less than ~12 ohms, and then it's trial and error. (I don't use the term "transimpedance" because that implies that all matches do work fine, and that is not my experience, nor does it conform to the facts as I perceive them.)

well, if you like your onboard phono section, get an SUT or two or three.

if not, how much you wanna spend on phono amplification altogether?

Viridian, As i see it, and as I just wrote it, yes, in theory the current driven phono stage presents a dead short to the cartridge, but in fact it cannot, because if it did, you would have a fancy mute switch. There's the rub with current drive.

Lew, I dont know how you see it, or how you wrote it, but a careful reading of my post will reveal the qualifier ""conceptually" which I believe is correct.

In practice it is impossible to achieve, but the practical outcome is, IMHO, the same, the lower the internal impedance of the cartridge, the greater the transfer of current to the phono stage. And that is because the internal impedance of a cartridge will likely be well above the input impedance of a transimpedance phono stage.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/sutherland-engineering-little-loco-phono-preamplifier-measurements

And as far as semantic distinctions go, I will continue to use the term "transimpedance" as it is common usage, in the same way that SME did not invent the common headshell configuration, Ortofon did. But the convention is to refer to it as the SME headshell, so to communicate with others I observe the convention. Communication is often a messy, and imprecise, business.

BTW I am not an advocate, nor an apologist, for transimpedance phono stages. Transfer of current is hardly synonymous with good sound, except in the instance of maximizing signal to noise ratio, and my apologies if I gave the impression that it was.