Help with burning in a phono stage

I bought an Einstein phono stage a few days ago, fully understanding that it would require perhaps 500 hours of break-in. (I'd borrowed a long-broken-in Einstein and really liked the sound.) Sure enough, the new one was a bit bright and hard, although the sound varied quite a bit during the first 20 hours of play.

One of my audiophile buddies loaned me a Thor phono break-in device. I'm no electronics whiz, so all I can say is that it allows me to plug a CD player into the phono stage by lowering the gain of the CD player and subjecting the signal to a reverse-RIAA curve. So I've set all of that up and will be playing various CD's on repeat for some period of time--perhaps even 500 hours, although I would imagine the Einstein will be fairly listenable after 200 hours or so.

Question 1: I understand that the phono stage needs to be plugged into a "load" during this break-in process. It is plugged into my pre-amp, but I don't want to listen to it during this process, and am instead listening to other inputs. Does using other inputs on the pre-amp somehow "disqualify" the phono stage signal from being plugged into a load?

Question 2: My pre-amp is a tube pre-amp. I would just as soon turn the pre-amp off at night. If I do that, will that cause the phonostage to not be plugged into a "load."

I'm sure these seem like elementary, perhaps almost idiotic questions, but electrical interactions are simply not something I was designed to grab hold of with any kind of ease.

Many thanks