Hello all I'm wondering if anyonelse has had anything similiar to what I just experienced today.
Here's an explanation, I was awakened to my car playing rather loud music with no one around, it was just thumping away. It was nearing dusk so the sun was flickering through the leaves directly at the IR sensor and I believe it triggered the player to start (awake from sleep as a button push would do). There is no other device in the car that would falsely do this and nothing had been changed in the car recently, this has never happened before. Now I realize this a freak occurance but what follows is what I need help with.
The result of the playing dropped the battery voltage enough that it wouldn't start. I figured this was going to be the case since the sound coming from the speakers was very erratic when I discovered it. Since then I've charged the battery the car is fine but the sound is now w/o any high frequecies at all the only sound is from the powered sub. So I checked the lights & fuses on both the Front Spk. amp & the Rear Spk. amp and they all in good shape & work. Next check was the player so I swapped players and the same result only low freq. In the house the sound is fine on AC power.
If anyone has some further insight or experienced something like it please reply. Could an amp (2 amps) blowout a circuit inside for highs? I have a cheap 50w RS Optimus for fronts & more expensive 1200w Profile for the rears. with the rears split and going to a powered sub. There are noise suppressors/filters inline to the amps.
Thanks for any insight.

There have been a couple (two) other reports of this happening to people over the years here. The exact problem has never been firmly identified, other than that the owner neglected to remove the empeg from the vehicle (theft potential!!).

Out of curiosity, did the player have Hijack installed on it at the time? Which version?

Cheers

I don't know what's caused your high frequencies to go bad in the player, other than a possible corruption of the flash RAM and/or hard disk which would cause the equalizer presets to be all screwed up. Check all the EQ presets, as well as the Hijack bass and treble adjustment settings.

Regarding the playing-by-itself problem, the current (not fully understood) wisdom on the topic can be found here.

Yes I have Hijack v464

I don't believe it's the players fault as I said I swapped the player for another so I've pretty much ruled the players fault out. I also tried it indoors it seems to work fine on both AC and DC via Hijack.
My ? is really more of the possibly the amps if anyone would no where else to check besides the obvious fuses or power light which check fine on both amps. Since the player & amps tried to play when the battery was giving out could that cause problems with the amps? I can't believe both amps would have the same problem and the sub amp wouldn't. I'm going to check this morning if the noise filters in between the amps & the player have gave out.

Well the noise filters were OK so I swapped out different speakers. The bad news is the speakers couldn't handle the dirty power it literally melted the area around the cones that glue to magnet sleeve, as soon as I remove the speaker you could smell the familar sulphur. At least the exspensive amps seemed to survive.
Usually I do take out my Empeg from the car but the parking lot I'm in is so hidden nobody knows where it is. Nothing has ever been stolen in this place ever, but now I have a reason.

Is there any way to make the Empeg shutdown completely in the car so this wouldn't happen again in case I do leave it in again? I never use the wake function because it would drag the battery down too fast (big amps).

I searched Rio before posting but didn't find this one. I believe it was the stray IR in my case which the sun could certainly supply, especially if it's flickering just wrong.

The bad news is the speakers couldn't handle the dirty power it literally melted the area around the cones that glue to magnet sleeve,

This does not seem reasonable to me.

I am not questioning your assertion that your speakers were damaged. After all, you were there!

But the way the empeg works, as the battery voltage drops, the player continues to work just fine until the voltage drops to (someone correct me if I am wrong here) somewhere around 10-11 volts, then it shuts off cleanly, turning off the amplifiers when it does so.

Hmmm... is it possible in this "auto-start" failure mode that the empeg either doesn't turn off when the voltage gets too low, or if it does turn off is it possible that it doesn't turn off the amps?

Why would low voltage to the amps cause damage to the speakers in any case?

This whole episode seems rather strange to me.

tanstaafl.

Perhaps the speakers were damaged by the volume, then after a while the battery was drained from the sustained playing.
Weird situation!

Science question: Is IR more prevalent in the evening? The sun's rays have to go through much more atmosphere... is that a factor?
Hmm...

I'm in no way blaming the player so much as letting people on the board know of a possible situation.

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I am not questioning your assertion that your speakers were damaged. After all, you were there!

They are definitely toast & even smell like burnt toast:). They won't even try to make a sound, I did a little autopsy on them the coils are melted together good. I swapped speakers for some older ones & they played fine in the car.

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But the way the empeg works, as the battery voltage drops, the player continues to work just fine until the voltage drops to (someone correct me if I am wrong here) somewhere around 10-11 volts, then it shuts off cleanly, turning off the amplifiers when it does so.

Would it do that if the player was on AC? Even though I'm still not convince the player was on AC just for the fact my system would simply be unbearable sound wise for no one to hear it at full volume. Someone would've complained about it, the landlord is just 50' away. The only reason I knew it was my car is I recognized a mix song that nobody would have at the end of the playlist, so I knew approximately how long it had been playing by that. I know I've had problems w/the remote not working when the sun hits it at my back I have to shield the sun off the sensor to get it to work so the sun's IR rays could trigger it if the leaves flickered just right, consider that any button will wake the player the code possibilities are greater. I know this sounds impossible but it sounds more plausible in my situation. I'm aware it would have to have the right sequence of pulses in order for this to happen I don't know what the wake pulse code would look like but I can definitely see this happen.

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Why would low voltage to the amps cause damage to the speakers in any case?

Yes under powered (distorted from over driving to achieve same volume) amps can kill a speaker quicker than just over powering them can if the signal is dirty (distorted from low power). It is always better to have an amp that rated higher than your speakers. I did have the stereo playing fairly loud the night before this happened so I imagine the low voltage going thru the amps was'nt very clean. My player will go off for awhile then come back on repeatedly in low voltage situations, I've had that happen before when the alternator was too small to keep up the battery. It has never shut completely off. I suppose this is why it kept playing when the battery was too low. I remember hearing the sound cut in & out just before I opened the car door to stop it. I wish I would've had the presence of mind to check the AC/DC status. I have never had the AC switch fail before and if it's a matter of thermal causes then I would certainly dismiss it as a cause because temps here are below freezing at the moment. Wouldn't the heat have to get to the back of the player to trigger the switch?

Irregardless I'm going to take the steps you mention Tony to prevent it from happening again luckily the speakers were'nt the most expensive & I was thinking of upgrading them soon as it was so at least they weren't the new ones that got fried.

Once the empeg fully shuts down, it won't respond to IR signals. By "fully shuts down", I mean "LED stops blinking" which is configurable somewhere. I forget what the default is; I changed mine to about 5 seconds -- long enough to wake it back up if I want to, otherwise shut down completely. However, if the AC switch is broken, it can cause the player to think that it shouldn't do that.

I now use Hijack's boot using the 'if tuner=1, force DC/Car' function so there's no mistakes, somehow I missed or forgot about this setting in Hijack, a great feature.

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I mean "LED stops blinking" which is configurable somewhere.

My players LED never stops blinking, I thought it blinked all the time when off. Where is this configured at?

Twice in 2 years my player has switched on by itself overnight. The first time I barely managed to start the car (overnight). The 2nd time was over a weekend (Fri-Mon) and when I got in the car, I could hear the drive spinning very slowly and there was no way the car would start. I have no idea what caused it to happen. :S

OK I thought you meant on AC power, the LED does go off when in the car, after a time. I do have it set for a long time, long enough I guess for it to come back on that one day. The AC switch is perfect upon further examination, there is no way any heat made the switch open I torture tested it and it passed. But I'm taking no chances this time it won't get my GOOD speaks.

Been away, why you ask, mostly cause I don't like the constant rebooting when stop & go visits. Most of my driving is short trips but many of them. I like when it picks up where it left off. There's a long boot period because I have TTS clock on it, and I don't always want to hear it everytime I get back in. I could understand shortening the time if I got in the car only a few times a day but that isn't the case, I don't have a long commute or extended periods in the car at one time.

On my old car, the Empeg was mounted quite high up on the dash (the ISO slot was there and it gave me a lot of satisfaction to have people salivating over the kewl visualizations when stuck in traffic) and I used to leave the empeg in the car while I was in the office carpark (extremely unlikely that someone would break in there as it was more protected than Fort Knox) and, during the summer, I realized that the empeg had a tendency to start on its own and sending a great deal of good auld music down the Alpine amps, which in turn depleted the battery (more than once) faster that you could say "Empeg gold, Cambridge tea" (LOL). IMHO the sun (very, very, very intense at that time of the year) was generating some nice IR interferences, instantly turning the poor empeg on. The install was done by a professional installer and cost me a fortune (OFC cables, amps, speakers, even external USB and gold plated RCA connectors, even for the AUX port), and the empeg worked flawlessly (to my great pleasure). Hijack (along with a million other things) was installed, can't remember the version though.

Cheers
Tony

Perhaps like my case either he had a long timeout or it was turned on before the standby timed out. I often leave the volume up loud when turning the car off. This accounts for the rapid battery drain & when the voltage falls below a specific level the amp turns into a dirty power injector making the speakers sound as if they are over driven (which they actually are for the voltage supplied) much the same as if it was on AC being over-driven. Tweeters blow out quicker because the higher freq. gets hotter faster, more energy, the coils actually melt into one single blob. If I had a digital camera I would post the pics.
I believe this just another method that can occur that ends w/the same result, not a mistaken diagnosis. There are 2 different problems one being admittedly more rare than the other, I wouldn't dismiss it as being only the AC switches fault. Unfortunately you can't easily reproduce the IR problem w/o removing the AC from the equation & waiting for it to happen again, which is what I'm doing now or I could blast the IR detector w/random sunburst to get a close version of sun IR since the sun has the whole spectrum of IR it is easier. My player should never boot to AC, in the car now as long as Hijack does it's job. So if it happens again I'll know for sure. I'm also planning on removing the AC switch completely from the equation by physically bypassing it altogether.