Tape heads need breaking in?
 

So something popped in our old Sony DSR-250, so we went a different route and got 2 XL2's for my organization.

We got them in, shot maybe 10 minutes of footage on it right out of the box to test it out with Final Cut, and took it straight from there to cover a football game (the USF vs. UConn game to be exact, in the driving rain no less). I'm about halfway through the first tapes, and there are some definite audio dropouts here and there on my Sony DSR-1500A deck, is this to be expected?

And if it is so, should I just record the lenscap on a tape or two through the other camera?

Might be too late now, but with any new DV camcorder you'll want to run a head-cleaning cassette before loading that first tape. Meanwhile trying playing the tapes back from the Canon camcorders to see if you still get the dropouts.

I just finished capturing the second half of the tape, no dropouts there. I'll make sure to run a cleaning tape on the other camera though.

Note that Canon recommend using the “dry” type of cleaning tape. In fact they state that using the “wet” type cleaning cassettes may damage the cam.