I was getting some alternator whine through my empeg on my Boxster, and so I started troubleshooting.
First thing I did was to replace the little blue taps I was using with soldering the power/ground wires. Did that. Still get the whine.

Next, I pulled out the Empeg sleeve. Uh-oh, there's a yellow wire and it's pin dangling in the back. Upon close inspection, the yellow wire with pin completely came out of the docking connector (I believe that this is pin 1 of the connector, which is the permanent 12V line). This pin should lock into the connector and not come out. The locking flange of the pin was folded back on itself, so there wasn't an edge to engage in the connector body, the fold of the copper was too smooth to catch. I carefully folded it back to its original position and inserted the pin back into the connector. I still get some noise. I measured the voltage with the key off, and it is indeed 12V.

So a couple of questions:

1. Anyone else seen this pin disengage from the connector?
2. After the Empeg has put itself to sleep when the car is shut off (I mean after the 60 second timeout), is the little
light supposed to stay on that is on the upper right of the Empeg? Should I be able to manually turn the Empeg
on without using the ignition signal? (I can't turn it on manually after the time out.)
3. If I do have a problem with permanent 12V, will the unit run from the ig sense input? (I'm not sure how long the
yellow wire was out of the connector, I could have pulled it out when I was soldering.)
4. Since my power does look OK, any other suggestions on getting rid of the whine? It's noticable when I have
the empeg on pause and volume turned up really loud (above about +23 for those of you with Becker units). Is
a power filter the only other solution? If I can also draw power from Ig. sense, then do I need to filter both?

thanks.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...

This happened to me as well. I took my empeg back to the installer because of a noise issue and he returned it to me out of my dash board with several wires detached from the docking connector.

I've fixed this problem (hopefully forever) with some solder and re-installed the unit.

Now I've got another problem. With the Perm power wire attached, the empeg will not power down while in the car. Selecting "Power Off" causes it to kill the audio but leave the display and visuals running. I'm stumped.

This is in a 2000 VW Passat w/ Alpine V12 amp.

- Nick
#080000519

I managed to reduce the alternator noise substantially. All I did was to bend down some of the tabs to keep the sled from going too far into the dash. This probably achieved two things: better grounding of the sled with the chassis, and secondly, ensuring that they empeg is fully engaged into the docking connector. I had been careful not to push it home too hard before as the whole sled would slide into the dash. Now I've moved the threshold on the volume where I hear any noise from the low 20's to the mid-30's. Mid-30's on my unit is *really loud*, louder than I listen to anything even with the top down and at high speeds. I'll forego any filtering for now. I do intend to keep visually checking the sled's docking connector pins to make sure they aren't getting pushed out due to docking. My theory is still that pulled too hard on the wiring and pulled out the pin. We'll see over time.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...