Phono pre "Break-In" process? Necessary?

Yes, components take time to break in.  Capacitors and their various resonances are a good example.  Different capacitors take differing times to form.  Different TYPES of capacitors take different amounts of time to form.  And most other components take time to form their various capacitances even if it is a simple resistor mounted to a circuit board (the board itself can act as a capacitor).  And as those capacitors form, it changes their resonances.  Resonances contribute HEAVILY to the sound of a component.

That's JUST the beginning.

BP,

Please google  "Capacitor Forming"  then comment.

Good listening
 
Peter

OK…what about "burn out" time? and "burn up" time…Berne Switzerland?…I need more of the tightly wrapped to comment on these things…come on now…I know you got somethin'…

The flagship Duelund capacitors that everyone is raving about are notorious for long break-in times, as much as 500 or 600 hours, so they say. Of course it’s always possible that some sort of group hypnosis is going on. ;-)

One High Fidelity Cables reviewer noted that the CT-1 ICs were 90% broken in after 10 hours. Well, I happen to be rather disenchanted with the whole idea of 90% of anything so it begs the question is break-in like recharging a cell phone for which the last 5% of charging takes the longest time? Aren’t we just trying to get the last 5% to get to the Promised Land?

wolf_garcia, are you merely fooling around and adding distortions to the soundtrack or are you searching to understand? I'd suggest, let your ears and your experience be the true test of whether something exists in the audio hobby/world. Trading ideas and experience can be helpful yet, to rely (or worse, depend) on measurements or someone else's convincing tale, is to miss the entire point.