Phono pre "Break-In" process? Necessary?

r_f,
I am also  fan of  Tom Waits. Do you have a recording of him live?
I know the engineer that recorded Bela fleck and the Flecktones and have the live recording of them in Africa that is truly amazing. 

When you hear music through a distortion-free system, the experience is not subtle. In fact Norm, the reviewer, has told me when he plays Basie at the Sands - he can literally recall the room they were in. The layout was identical and every detail of the performer and audience could be heard as natural as when he was there,

It will recover the original venue in every way. As you can probably tell at this point It is difficult to explain to someone what they are about to hear. Your speakers produce acoustic energy based on an actual "re-enactment" of the air pattern present at the time of the recording. The most important property of the playback is the speed that sound waves are released from your speakers. Sound has 2 properties - pressure and time. The waves flow as if uninterrupted from the stage.

When you system appears to have nothing to do with what you are hearing - then its right. Sound objects are lifted away from the speakers and float in space. The speed is locked at Mach One and there is no sonic signature.
You cannot tell if it is tubes or transistors. The image is 100% stable (same as live) and it comes out of a jet black background.

I wish I had more demo units to send out - people end up keeping them.
I don't know where you are located but I do plan to show at Newport Beach in June. Almost all the editors of top magazines have agreed to see what the fuss is about including 4 of the top movie makers.

Roger

Well, yes but only the live performance anyone could have, Glitter & Doom is on both vinyl (my preference) and redbook CD and is an excellent selection of songs from many (if not all) of the venues in this tour. Two things to keep in mind, Mr. Waits only tours about every seven years or so, and, he is usually very picky about finding nice old opera and concert venues to perform in. His musicians are exemplary as well. If you don’t, you really should own this recording. It is a treat. And it may play very well into what your amp is doing.

Happy Listening!

TLDR (too long, didn't read) ...

I don't know if it was mentioned yet but one of the biggest "break-in offenders" is capacitors.  Some Teflon caps are notorious for taking multiple hundreds of hours and they go through weird stages along the way.  They sometimes get worse before they get better.  I won't get into the why's here (I'm guessing there were contentious statements both for and against, and I don't have time to discuss).

Most capacitors are not like this however and 50 hours 'll do ya fine.  It doesn't hurt to get the manufacturer's take on this.

Jim Hagerman used to sell an inverse RIAA circuit.  I don't know if he still does.  It allowed you to run a CD signal into your phono stage (dropping the gain by ~44dB and inverting the RIAA eq) so you can hear music amplified through it.  50 hours occurs a lot faster when listening to CDs vs. changing 150 record sides ;-)

Of course, if it sounds fine out of the box, it will only get better (one would hope), so you needn't jump through hoops unless you want to.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier Design

The "same as live" concept is irrelevant, except you can shoot for timbre and room feeling I suppose (I’ve mixed and recorded hundreds of live concerts from Richie Havens to the Baltimore Consort), and "black backgrounds" exist in a vacuum only. We really have to ban the "black background" term…really…perhaps the most overused and patently useless audio bullshit term since it appeared a few years ago. Maybe "noiseless" is OK…still…the world has ambient sound in it, and "hearing a venue" sort of makes my point. It does. Trust me (!). Is an image stable when you move your head? No, it’s not, but again…live images as a reference are often vague unless you’re sitting on the stage with the musicians (I argue this point often). Good hifi lets the results of the recording engineer’s panning (and mic placement) or lack of same shine through…I get it (and, I do it). I also think great music makes any decent system "disappear," and I have piles of actual acoustic instruments I can play that are within several feet of my "listening" audio rig (and surrounding my home recording rig) and I know what they sound like…I can make un-miked live natural wooden acoustic instruments distort in your face (uh…is that a capacitor or your MAMA), and they come from a "black background" only in somebody’s imagination.