Okay, this has been bugging me for a bit and I finally got the time to troubleshoot. Basically, shortly after staring the player in the car, when I first leave the house, the right channel would always cut out (I only use the front leads, rears were removed, this is a miata). The right speaker would only emit this loud hiss, accompanyed by loud popping when pausing/unpausing the song. The only way around the problem seemed to be rebooting the empeg (pull it out and put it back in). I would have to resort to the 'reboot' a couple times more in the next few minutes (gotten worse over time) until things 'heated up' as I could tell. I've since tested the following:

- switched RCA left/right at the amp, left speaker would then cut out, problem is before the amp

- Unplugged RCA when channel cut out and hiss goes away, so hiss is comming from source (empeg)

- New RCA cables so they aren't the problem

- Unplugged my RPM/Tach serial sender unit, unplugged AUX input source, pulled wiring out so I could lay the dock on the center console. No wire pulling/movement and problem still occurs

- Brought empeg inside, listened through computer/headphones and right channel is staticy as well until a reboot.

Unless I'm crazy, there is something in the empeg behind this problem. My guess is a dry solder somewhere on the board for the right channel but I don't know where to start looking as all the solder connection are so small .

Anyhow else experience this. Any ideas of where I should start looking for a bad connection? Before/after the DSP? Before after the DAC? Everything looks good but I've only removed the HD drive at looked from above at this point, haven't removed the main board to get a better look.

I saw posts related to this at one time but I've been searching for 2 hours as haven't found anything.

Are you also occasionally getting hard disk errors? Someone else has reported that a dry solder joint on his IDE header was responsible for both the hard disk errors as well as some noise issues.

Anyway, your diagnosis that it's a loose solder joint sounds likely, so yeah, look for that sort of thing. Post pictures if you find it, because you're not the only one reporting problems with one of the two audio channels.

Note that it could be very very small and hard to see. If you've seen the pictures of the IDE header problems in the FAQ, you'll see what I mean by small.

I have just started getting similar problems with my empeg a couple of days ago. In my car, my front right channel cuts in and out a lot. Very often it happens when I hit a bump on the road. When it is out, and sometimes during booting, I get a hiss sound coming out of the front right speker.

In my house if I connect my empeg to Mark Lord's docking unit my right channel is often out. But if I connect directly to the RCA outputs without the docking unit I always get both channels. I have received a "no hard drive found error" a few times recently as well. I opened my empeg and disconnected and reconnected the hard drive cables and looked for anything abnormal but I could not find anything.

What should I do?

Sounds to me like the wiring on the sled is loose. For some reason it seems to be happening to the right channel most often and in fact mine has the same problem. I find that pushing on the right side of the Empeg while docked seems to at least temporarily establish a solid connection. The solution is to recrimp or replace the contacts associated with that channel or add digital out which has one less wire to worry about.

Stu

Well today finished the final event of the autocross season so I can do some real debugging. My right channel problems is gone but I did two things at the same time. I was pushing on connections, etc. but I also reloaded the 2.0 developer's image. I forgot that I still had my own 2.0 kernel on there though I had the additional features turned off on boot. There may have been an unintialized value or something. My modifications allowed a userspace application to hijack a small portion of the display for its own use. It also collected information over the serial port about rpm/speed/topup or down and used that to change sound parameters. (volume for now, EQ was planned but its been 2 years and Phillips won't give me the DSP EQ parameter information I want).

Anyhow, that problem seems to have disappeared for now. As for the hard drive issue, I only got the problem once, while playing with the empeg, as I plugged the cable in one-off, but that was an easy fix.

However there are two other problems to work on.

1)

Jjust since I've had the player put out some nasty screeches, similar to what I've had with bad MP3 files but on files thay have plenty of plays on them. I did notice a small metal thing on my work desk today... hmmm... hey that's one of the hard drive mounting plate screws. Thinking that the extra bouncing caused possibile bad reads from the HD leaving those nasty gaps in the MP3 playback.

2)

A constant 'hiss' in the high end (tweeters) that does not change volume with source volume but goes away when I unplug the RCAs from the amp. I'm going to play with the amp gains/other sources to see if the noise is pre/post amp.

Gotta love the car audio environment. I'm suprised there isn't more noise with all the cables squished back behind the miata's dash.