Ok, I think I have may have a grasp on why my Empeg is not working correctly in the car. There never has been any problems while installed at home.

The first symptom I noticed is that after 20 minutes of playing in the car the player would cut out. I researched and the FAQ as well as this BBS and installed the latest version of hijack. Ths seemed to fix this problem, though as a side note at the same time I replaced the battery in the car with a new Interstate Battery. Maybe this problem is semi-related to "Symptom Three" below and replacing the battery fixed this problem?

The second symptom I noticed is when the hard drive spins up the Empeg goes into standby for a few second then resumes. This problem rears its head especially when the lights or other accesories are on. This is easy to diagnose. Not enough power from the 35w alternator to run player.

The third symptom is that during highway driving, the Empeg freezes then it will not respond at all nor will it reboot. There always is a "No Hard Drive error. Contact Support" message after reboot. I tried removing the player from the cars DIN cage and using a 12V 1A cigarette lighter adapter on the back of the player to reboot the player. After reboot player runs fine in both modes, home and car. I thought this was a hard drive cable problem and subsequentialy replaced the cable with a new one from SB/Empeg. Replacing the cable did not repair this problem though. Then I figured that maybe the shock of the highway driving may be loosening the cable from the connectors. BUT, I should not be able to reboot the player with the "home" connector if the drives are not hooled up corectly. I opened player anyway and saw nothing awry.

Now my theory. I think maybe all of these problems are a symptom of a problem with the car power. The power does not seem to dip below 12v at all during the hard drive runup though on the digital ammeter. Also the Neo25II that uses the 12v cigarette lighter supply does not have any problems with the power supply, it runs at 5vdc 2a max. Maybe using 2-30gb hard drives is draining all of the power when both are runup to speed (2 drives at 5vdc = 10vdc???)? Possibly if I was running only one drive I would not have a power problem?

Is anyone else running dual hard drives having any problems with power consumption?



Sean in NC

Player specs: MK2A 60gb /2.0-b11 / hijack v264