Thanks genexia... I'll give that a shot. Maybe I just got lucky and pushed the player into the sled a little harder one time? Maybe the car was warming up and that helped? I keep thnking that the empeg must be the culprit this time because of the "data" noise being transmitted through the speakers.. so this makes sense.

My next experiment will be to see if wiring the player directly to the battery will help the battery icon. Are "performance" batteries really expensive?