I'm wondering if it's ok to leave an empeg in the car most of the time rather than taking it out. Especially during 90+ degree F days in the summer and below 30 deg F nights in the winter. To me, it kind of defeats the purpose of having "all my music in one place" if I have to drag the whole unit around w/ me instead of a binder full of a few CD-Rs.

This is covered in the FAQ here and here.

I'm aware of that, but I'm curious as to what people are actually doing with theirs. I'm also not sure how hot it would really get inside a car on a summer day... although I assume it's probably a lot less than 140 F, even w/ a black car.

Actually, from what I hear, the temps inside a car in the summer can get well over 140. And in the winter, with temps below 30, the Empeg display is really really slow to update. I wouldn't keep it in the car 24/7 just becuase of the stress on the HDD durring cold boots. It'll drastically shorten the life of the HDD

I take mine out and carry it with me.

I live in Houston Texas and I am also concerned about heat. It gets stupid hot here in the summer. What is the hottest someone has had their car with the EMPEG left in?

Steve

I live in Dallas, Texas, and unless I had the unit permanently mounted in my truck, I wouldn't leave it in there. It gets too hot! Don't you guys want to use it at work?

The first six or seven months I had mine, I took it out of my truck every night. Then I noticed that I was damaging my bay and my EMPEG. I started leaving it in all the time. When its really hot out the player wont turn on, or it shuts off a few minutes after its on. If its really cold out, when it powers up the display is very dim. Sometimes, if its really cold, I will get some type of strange ticking noise when the drive spins up.

When its really hot out the player wont turn on, or it shuts off a few minutes after its on. If its really cold out, when it powers up the display is very dim. Sometimes, if its really cold, I will get some type of strange ticking noise when the drive spins up.

These are Bad Things. Do you have your MP3s backed up somewhere? 'Cause you might be shopping for a new disk drive soon.

What kind of damage occurred? The only thing I notice is the surface scratches where the dock rubs against the steel surface of the player. I would think that would be normal.

All my mp3s are on my hard drive on my pc. It takes me about 8 hours or so to send them all to the EMPEG through the USB cable. When I use the player in normal temp ranges it works fine. The only thing is, I have a Dakota and if I put the heat on top and bottom output, the heat vents are right above where the player sits. If I leave the heat on too long, that too will turn my player off. I have had if for a WHILE now and it been pretty decent. I just got a 60 gig model yesterday cause I was gonna upgrade my hard drive ( I have an old model with a 12 gigs of space). It was cheaper to buy the 60 gig player then it was to buy two decent 30 gig laptop drives. Now I am having a hell of a time getting all my songs to the new 60 gig player. My USB connection keeps crashing in windows XP. If my player is off when I load emplode up, I have to hit refresh about 6 times to get to see it pop up. Then it works normally. If my EMPEG is on when I start emplode, it sees my player immediatly, but hangs when I click synchorize. This is pretty stressful.

Thats what I mean. I guess its not really damaged, its just gouges from taking it in and out. I also notice that the connector in the back of the docking bay kind of flops around a bit more then when it was new. I also noticed that the sticker that says warranty void if seal is broken is sliced because of the constant removal and insertion of my player. It would not be good if I ever had something happen to it and couldn't get it fixed because that sticker was broken...

The steel is pretty thick, so I'm not concerned about it wearing out. In fact, I have never heard of someone wearing all the way through the steel. Don't worry about the sticker, David has ways of knowing if you took the cover off or not. So you are covered. The connector flops around because it is designed to have a certain amount of play in it.

Sean

Spend 10 or 15 dollars and get yourself an ethernet card. Usb is much slower. I have never had the heat turn my player off - except for when I first received my player - it turned out my board had some bad ram on it.

Sean

I guess its not really damaged, its just gouges from taking it in and out.

They should be faint scratches, not gouges. Mine is over a year old, and they are still just gentle little scratches. And my player gets inserted and removed from the sled about 4-6 times a day on average. Perhaps the sled is gripping it too tightly? Does it slide easily in and out? When you installed it, did the sled get bent oddly or did you have to cram or force it in there?

The "guide-bumps" on the sled that cause the scratches should be on bendable tabs that you can loosen. At least on the sides and top. On my old Mark1, I had to bang on the bumps with a hammer to loosen them (the Mark1 did actually get gouges and they did become a problem).

I also notice that the connector in the back of the docking bay kind of flops around a bit more then when it was new.

This is normal, this is covered in the FAQ.

I also noticed that the sticker that says warranty void if seal is broken is sliced because of the constant removal and insertion of my player. It would not be good if I ever had something happen to it and couldn't get it fixed because that sticker was broken.

This is also normal and is nothing to worry about.

Wow, I just noticed that the three FAQ entries I just linked are right in a row, one after the other, in the FAQ. What a coincidence.

I have never had the heat turn my player off - except for when I first received my player - it turned out my board had some bad ram on it.

Good point. I had forgotten about that old problem.

Your player shouldn't be rebooting or shutting down, even when it's hot. It should keep right on going like a champ, right up to the moment the hard disks fail completely. If it's shutting down due to temperature extremes, there might be some kind of a hardware problem with it (like the bad RAM terminator just described, or perhaps something else).

I really hope I don't have bad ram. It's actually really well behaved most of the time. I only remember it shutting off for absolutely no reason one time. I appreciate the fact that you guys all seem genuinly interested in the things people post here. This is my first night on your site. It is set up very well. I printed out all of the faqs you have on the site and I am going to read them all this weekend. I had to put my printer into landscape mode to get it to print right and it totaled well over 100 pages. That will take a while to cover this weekend. I'm really glad to have so much useful information though. Thanks for the responses to my posts and I look forward to asking questions and perhaps helping others here in the future.

It should be noted we've never had any reports of bad ram on the mk2a, only the mk2. I'm suspicious of the batch of Siemens DRAM we were supplied for the mk2...

Hugo

When I clicked on one of those faq links, my computer just started freaking out. Internet Explorer kept continuously opening new windows. And it didn't stop when I logged off the net; I had to restart it.

I tend to keep my player in the car all the time, unless I'm squirting new tunes or a kernel into it. The parking lot here at work is reminiscent of the Sahara Desert. I'm in Phoenix, AZ (well, Mesa actually, but close enough for government work)..

When I clicked on one of those faq links, my computer just started freaking out. Internet Explorer kept continuously opening new windows. And it didn't stop when I logged off the net; I had to restart it.

No one else has reported this problem. I don't see how anything in any of those links could have caused the problem you describe. Can you point me to one of the links in question?

I had to put my printer into landscape mode to get it to print right and it totaled well over 100 pages.

Interesting, I just checked the Installation Notes section in "print preview", and you're right. the extra-wide illustrations in the section about Subwoofer outputs have broken the printer-friendly-ness of the FAQ. I now see why you had to print it landscape. Hmm, dunno how to fix that, those pictures will be hard to shrink down without some work.

There is also the option that Drakino suggested, making a link to a printer-friendly version. All it would need to do is get rid of the left-hand navigation bar and put all the sections together. Tom?

I'll look into hacking this up sometime soom (probably on Sunday).

I wasn't complaining about it. I think the faq is really good. I'm just saying that the formatting was a little off. I'm sure whatever you guys come up with will be a good solution.

I'm just saying that the formatting was a little off.

Right. The formatting is, as far as I can tell, only off on that one section, and only because of those particular illustrations.

skamp wrote: I live in Houston Texas and I am also concerned about heat. It gets stupid hot here in the summer. What is the hottest someone has had their car with the EMPEG left in?

I also live in Houston. I keep my Mk2 in the car all the time, only taking it out when I want to add more music to it. I had it in the car all summer, and I park outdoors. The only hot weather problem I ever had was that the Mk2 control knob would start "slipping" (you would spin the knob and nothing would happen). They have a fix for the Mk2 (a small rubber washer), and the Mk2a solves the problem completely (by having a keyed knob).

Aside from that, I never had hot weather problems.

P.S. We've probably got enough Texans here now that we could think about a Texas Empeg Get-together. Hmmm....

Hello All

As someone who has experienced the great pleasure of having one's car broken into three times over the last few years...I NEVER leave my player in the car overnight and only leave it in the car (hidden) for short periods or in the dash under direct surveillance. I found out the hard way that our wonderful insurance companies assign "depreciation" to car audio products. I never received full compensation for any of my previous losses despite my HUGE premiums for a 12 year old car....

On a related note about heat: I've noticed that when I leave my Mk2 plugged in all night, for example, while syncing a lot of data, it's quite hot to the touch in the morning. My Mk2a, however, is still cool to the touch.

Is this a known bug in the Mk2? Everything seems to work okay, as the Mk2 spends its days in the car, where it turns itself off, whereas the Mk2a spends its days at home, plugged in to the wall and the home stereo.

I had that same problem with my control knob slipping too. I added some plumbers thread tape (the white stuff that stretches) and that did the trick...

Heat inside a car can get well over 140F...that in an understatement. On a nice summer day the heat inside a car can easily get over 200F in a very short time period. That is why leaving animals or children in an unattended car is a major crime in the US.

We had a guy locally here in the Bay Area get arrested and put away. He went inside his parent's house to watch Japanese Animation and left his baby in the car for a couple hours. I think you know how it ended. Sad. Some people have no common sense. Although a empeg is not a baby (well, to some at least), you still need to care for it.

Over 200? That's hard to believe. Have you ever had a cup of water start boiling in your car?

I think air temp and water temp are different.. =)

What's the difference between temperature and heat?

Calvin

Temperature is average kinetic energy of medium's molecules divided by Boltzman's constant, heat is total kinetic energy of a system (and is observable only when transfered from system to system) - or something along these lines

I wonder if this is enough of a clue to figure the difference between 200 degrees of air and 200 degrees of near boiling water sitting on the empeg? ;-)

Calvin

Duh, anybody could have told you that.

No difference, of course. However, radiative heating from sun will tend to warm up solid, dark surfaces first. Air (and water) will be heated mostly convectively, and will take quite a while to reach anything near the equilibrium. I don't believe anything in the car will reach 200F except perhaps a piece of something matte black in direct sunlight.

Temperature - average kinetic energy of molecules in a substance
Heat - is the TRANSFER of energy from one substance to another due to a difference in temperature.
These are strict physics definitions, but who cares?

OK, I was close enough...

I care very much. My chem teacher was totally unable to explain the difference.
So I guess when you shove someone you are quite litterally giving them some 'heat' || raising their temperature.

Yeah i leave it in the car all the time, except for a couple of times a year to do a software update and shuffle the tunes around.

Kinda pointless having all my tunes in the car if i have to take them in and out with my all the time, and besides, where would i put it when i'm at the beach or skiing?

Mind you the temperatures here at the bottom of new zealand probably aren't so extreme, -10 to 35 centigradge would be the extremes, Not sure what the is in F.

Im in NZ, however in Auckland, so Im a little scared to leave it in the car.

Hehe, yeah my bro in auckland has had about 3 car breakins. So i wouldn't leave it in without an alarm if i lived up there.

I have left it in up there during a number of stays though.

Also, the locks on my subaru aren't screwdriveable like most of his cars have been.