burning in capacitors for phono stages

Sns,To break in all the caps, solder your caps together in series. Put an RCA on on end, and a 10K ohm resistor on the other end. Run a ground wire from the RCA shell to the other end of the resistor to form a complete circuit. plug this assembly into your pre amp out put. Turn on the Tuner, turn up the volume a third of the way, and go to bed. When you get up in the morning all your caps you soldered together will be broken in and you should be ready to try your experiments.

Don't waste your money on Audio salon caps. all you will need are available from Mouser or Digikey.

As long as you are working on the phono stage, why don't you replace the loading resistors with Vishay S102's? as well as any shunt resistors that are usually located at the output of hte phono stage. They will make as big or bigger difference than the caps.

Happy listening.

Thanks Johnss, I will try that break in procedure for my speaker crossover caps.

As for the cost of boutique caps, I find it rather inexpensive for amount of change I hear. I consider cabling a high cost item for relatively little change. Besides, it is fun listening to all the different caps, and they can always be resold or auditioned in other equipment.

I've thought about changing out resistors, the problem is they are often buried under tons of parts.

Anyway, one thing at a time, its cap auditioning time right now.

Sns- Right you are about the sonic benefits of high quality caps and the fact that the sound changes after the dielectric forms it's charge(commonly referred to as, "burn-in"). I've always purchased mine(and Vishays) from Michael Percy. He will match your components to 1% tolerance(good for channel balance). An excellent selection of polystyrene/polypropylene caps too: (http://www.percyaudio.com/Catalog.pdf)

Here's something else that might interest you: (http://www.geocities.com/rjm003.geo/rjmaudio/diy_rack.html)

Thanks for the info Rodman. I'm using the burn in scheme suggested by Johnss. We'll see how that works.