Charles, I know how much you revere sufficient break-in before judging a component. Don;t forget those little wires in the tonearm and cable connecting it to your phono stage. They will almost never break in with the small current generated by a cartridge. here's what I recomment.
- get 2 male RCA's from radio shack or a personal store.
- get some solid core wire of a guage that will fit nicely into your tonearm cartridge clips.
- soldier a separate wire to the + and another to the - side of each RCA
- plug the RCA's into the out of your CD player
- plug the other end of the solid core wire into your cartridge clips, making sure to get R +/- and L +/- correct
- plug the tonearm cable into your preamp, bypassing the phono stage (CD/AUX in).
- now burn those cables in using CD's for a couple of days. That's 2V coming out of your CD player as opposed to .7mv from a cartridge.
Good luck,
Bob