How do I break in a tube amplifier?


I should be taking delivery of my Yaqin MC-30L tube amplifier this weekend. I believe the dealer is going to set it up and bias it and may even let it run for a few hours before I pick it up. It's going to be a 2nd system sharing speakers with my primary home theater system so I will have few opportunities to leave it running for extended periods of time.

Does it do any good to just leave the amplifier turned on or does it actually need to by playing music?
mceljo
I had the large caps replaced on my former ARC CL-60. I walked into the store's back room where my amp was sitting on a table. It was turned on with no speakers attached.
The tech told me it is alright to have the amp powered up as long as you don't try to drive it (no input signal from a pre-amp).

A dealer told me that broken-in tube equipment takes about an hour warm-up to sound best whereas solid-state takes 24 hours.
Yogiboy - I'm strongly considering doing this, but the audiophile in my struggles with the idea of something unecessary in the signal path.

Wolf_garcia - Will the tape outputs bypass the preamp in the receiver? I did figure out the setting last night were my receiver will pass all audio signals to the TV so I can just set the speakers to "no" and use the TV for volume when the speakers are not connected. This is also a workable solution for everything but movies that don't happen often.
Mceljo- Why don't you get a pair of inexpensive speakers for your TV? You really don't need high end speakers to watch movies! That's what I do! Just a suggestion!
Tape outs generally bypass the volume pot of a receiver, although I'm not sure about the rest of the circuitry like tone controls and all that...they're designed that way due to the fact that tape decks have input faders that should be impervious to preamp gain.
Yogiboy - The primary reason is that I only have a 1,200 sq-ft house and the WAF alone would prevent me from having multiple sets of speakers in the same room. Plus, giving up my good speakers for blu-ray would be a very poor choice because both my wife and I really enjoy the HD audio quality. My wife has only commented on a single CD being a bad recording, but definately notices when a movie's soundtrack isn't HD, it makes a significant improvement.

Wolf-garcia - One of my EE audio friends suggested that the pre-outs with the recievers volume set to 0 db might be a better way to go. His comment was "tape out would work but I think the impedance and signal voltage may be slightly different than an actual pre-amp output." I guess I'll have to try both and see what works best. I'm guess that both will work and I might not really be able to tell the difference.