How do I break in a tube amplifier?

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.

Preamp outs would be better if available.

I have pre-amp outputs available, the concern that I had was having two points of volume control. My EE buddy reminded me that I just needed to the the receiver volume at 0db and the input signal should effectly pass through without attenuation.

Well, I managed to get the on and off sequence backwards, but it seems to survive. I did get right at 3 hours of listening (not all 100% supervised) and plan to sleep for at least 3 hours so should be able to comply with that rule at least this time. An enjoyable evening of Christmas music.