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Capacitor burn in, Capacitor Cooker? Need help...

Okay thinking of a new pair of output caps on my preamp, I have changed them before with excellent results.. However they sounded good off the bat, I decided to run the pre with some really cheap tubes for somewhere around 7 days or nearly 200 hours with a load on them via RCA's with Resistors on them to very good results..
And yes they sounded 5 times better after this...

I do not want to do this again honestly, and in this application this time will be pretty difficult to pull off, I have heard of somebody or some other method around to cook the caps on their own somewhere vs. having to run them in the component they will be installed.

Anybody know about this, or any good ideas?
Thanks
undertow
4est
507 posts
 
There is no free lunch, just put them in
stevecham
3,340 posts
 
The best way to "break something in," be it electrical or mechanical, is to simply put it into the intended service application.
mingles
796 posts
 
I haven't used it, but Jim Hagerman makes a burn-in generator called the FryBaby: http://www.hagtech.com/frybaby.html
undertow OP
1,033 posts
 
Mingles,
The fry baby looks good for 39 bucks.. However not sure that it can do capacitors or not, I will have to investigate as they don't state much beyond using it on standard interconnect applications.. The power might be too low anyway, but also only a battery life of about a day so I guess not a big deal but buying about 8 9volt batteries to burn up on this process will cost as much as the unit in the end.
dgarretson
2,597 posts
 
For a poor man's break-in, solder the cap to some lamp cord and plug into AC for a month or so.
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