OK, Just used my mk 1 for the first time in anger at the weekend. It was running my Full-on Competition SPL stereo system. On first glance, the mp3 player looks an ideal choice, as the disk only spins up every so often, (a CD player skips in my van passed 150db so I need to have it on a fly lead and just hold it) Well the empeg dont like my van either (and I was told it would be fine) Just like the CD player, when the disk trys to spin up it stops. The bad thing is though, It gives up, and crashes. None of the buttons would respond, and the only way to get it working again was to rip it out of its cage for a re-boot. Not very cool. I had to start holding it again to stop this happening. The display also died completely on me a couple of times. (this has been repaired before)

Well, anything in a competition show vehicle needs to be 100% and unfortunatly I am a bit dissaponted with the empeg as yet. I did give it a go though, and the player certainly raised some interest. (before it nearly went in the bin)

The player is fine on its fly leads, but I really wanted a player in my dash. A solution may be to give my player a stack more ram, so it can play for longer off hard memory, and get it to keep on trying the disk, untill it gets between tracks, or to auto lower the volume, so it can load some more music.

May be you want to disregard this message though. just like the others, as the empeg seems not to be for the mainstream ICE market at the moment.

Wow. So what was the cause of the lockups you say? Are you saying that it was because of vibration from 150db worth of sound pressure making the hard disks fail?

The SPL stuff you're doing: is it that real crazy stuff Tanstaafl talks about? Where you need plexiglass windows riveted in place, and a turnbuckle between the roof and the floor? That's some pretty insane vibration. I don't think it's fair to get mad if the Empeg can't take that kind of punishment.

I don't know what kinds of vibrations the Empeg is supposed to take, but have you opened it up and looked to see if there are any problems with the mountings or if the drive tray/cables are interacting adversely with the components?

I never posted this on the board before, but I once discovered that my first drive's IDE cable was rubbing up against a jumper on the motherboard, and I needed to fix the problem before the cable's traces got worn through. I also found that the rubber shock mounts would come out of their moorings if given too much stress. Perhaps it's something simple like that.

Now I'm sure that SPL competition isn't what Empeg had in mind for their product. Hard disks can only take so much (although they can take more than most CD players can). But perhaps a little work with the drive mountings would manage to let it squeak by. I think what you're dealing with is a device that simply wasn't designed to take those kinds of g-forces "out of the box", but it might still have promise if you're willing to work with the mountings yourself a little bit. For something as serious as SPL competition, you have to take matters into your own hands. You can't expect the manufacturers to support that kind of usage for the product. You'll need to make some modifications yourself. Some judiciuous use of foam rubber beneath the drive tray might be enough. Or perhaps longer IDE cables, with the drives given a more flexible mounting somewhere else, perhaps in the glove box.

Empeg, of course, won't endorse that sort of thing, and it would definitely be considered abuse. I just wanted to make that clear. But if you're serious about making this thing work for SPL, you're going to have to look into stuff like that.

___________
Tony Fabris

2 issues here, 1. It crashes when it cant access the disk. 2. The display still falls over even though it has been repaired.

PS. I am glad you do not work for Mclaren. I am sorry Mr Coultard but we feel that you have been driving your F1 car too hard, and just because you are a top competitor, you have no excuse. The next time you blow an engine, we suggest that you get out your spanners and fix it your self. We will not be sendind it back to Mercedes/Ilmore. We realise that this will give Ferrari the championship, but we at Mclaren F1 do not take responsibility for your actions out in competition. We do feel that if we could be bothered to take an interest that it may mean better engines for all of us in the long run.

2 issues here, 1. It crashes when it cant access the disk. 2. The display still falls over even though it has been repaired.

PS. I am glad you do not work for Mclaren. I am sorry Mr Coultard but we feel that you have been driving your F1 car too hard, and just because you are a top competitor, you have no excuse. The next time you blow an engine, we suggest that you get out your spanners and fix it your self. We will not be sendind it back to Mercedes/Ilmore. We realise that this will give Ferrari the championship, but we at Mclaren F1 do not take responsibility for your actions out in competition. We do feel that if we could be bothered to take an interest that it may mean better engines for all of us in the long run.

I believe that you are being a little unfair IMHO. Most things are warrantied for normal wear and tear. If I had had a normal engine and tranny built I would not expect them to fix them if they blew up during drag racing so I had them both made to take the extra abuse they are given. Maybe I don't understand the use you are giving the empeg in competition but I agree with Tony, you should expect to have to do some of the modifications yourself to get the expectations you are looking for. They are built for normal use.

Laura

I live to launch.

I don't see any emails from you to support@empeg.com, or any call logs from you. We don't provide tech support proactively - you have to ask for it!

Nonetheless...

> 1. It crashes when it cant access the disk.

The kernel retries failed disk reads for a long time before giving up - a couple of minutes I believe. At that point the player may well crash, but if it can't get one good read from the disk within two minutes then there's probably not much point in continuing to try! I'm surprised that you can't get any good disk reads at all within your vehicle - our shock testing created extremely harsh conditions and the player continued to run perfectly, even with caching switched off. There are some tests we can do to find out where the problem lies, but you'll need to contact technical support for that.

> 2. The display still falls over even though it has been repaired

Unless it's been repaired in the last couple of months, it won't have been fully fixed. We recently tracked down the root cause of the problem and now fit transient supressors to failed units to prevent recurrence. Again, if you were to contact support we would offer to apply this fix to your unit.

Rob

PS. I am glad you do not work for Mclaren. I am sorry Mr Coultard but we feel that you have been driving your F1 car too hard, and just because you are a top competitor, you have no excuse.

Heh, interesting analogy.

I didn't mean to sound condescending in that last post, I meant it more like this:

If you're doing something more than just the consumer use of the stereo, then you should expect to need to do some DIY work on it. Surely not all of the stuff you've done for the SPL competitions is "stock"? You've had to make personal custom modifications to your car and amplification, why not expect the same for the stereo?

Your race-car analogy is a good one because it points up this very issue. Race cars are highly customized, and require their own maintenance crew- dozens of people working around the clock to support one driver's brief spurts of competition. And when the driver blows an engine, they have to be prepared to repair it themselves. You can't expect to drive a street-legal car off the dealer's lot and compete in a serious racing competition without modifying the car first and having some support ready.

All I was suggesting was that in order for the Empeg to tolerate being in the cabin during an SPL competition, you'll have to work on its shock-mounting some more. What do the other competitors do with CD players and such? I can't imagine a CD player tolerating that kind of vibration either.

Oh, and I'll bet Mr. Coultard still gets his head bitten off by his manager each time he blows an engine.

___________
Tony Fabris

Fair point, but I do run Super Street. No amplifier modifications (in fact all equipment must be commercially availible) and Super Street means that there must be NO body mods to the vehicle forward of the B post. ALL this (stock) equipment ran for near on 3 hours on saturday night, full tilt with NO problems, in fact my amps only got luke warm (and they push a few Kw). I was linked up with 2 other cars for a bit of a party.

Ok back to the story, well I suppose I will take a bit better care of the empeg and treat it like a CD player, wrap it in cotton wool etc..... Yes my various other source units all skip and jump much much easyer than the empeg.

Joke over, thanks for your help.

PS check out my van at www.termpro.com/asp/competitorstats.asp?Competitor_ID=30

I think that about answers why then.

If the display continues to fall over, when I isolate it a bit more, then I will send it back again. Thanks.

Thanks for that, I live to make as much noise as I can?

The empeg is the only thing that has broken this year.(for the past 2 years even)

This is some serious vibration!!

maybe a re-design of the sled mounting system is needed. a separate, ventilated, foam box with spring suspension mounts?

Out of interest, have you ever measured the air pressure in the cabin? must be a great reading in kilopascals!

Murray 06000047
____________________

damn, that's no van, that's a wall of speakers and amps!!! how does iron maiden sound in that?

I am a number, not a free man! And that number is fifteen-thousand five-hundred sixty-two.

Firestarter, you are a strange individual -- but then, everybody I have ever met who competes in the SPL division of audio competitions is pretty weird, in my book at least.

I want you to know that I am currently the Alaska State SPL champion in my category, which is vehicles with less than 160 square inches of subwoofer cone area. I accomplished this amazing feat by putting out (are you ready for this?) an incredible 118 decibels. That's right -- 118. Many people actually listen to their music at settings louder than that, and the only way I could get even that loud was to play the cannon sequence from Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture!

I have only a single 10" sub, and I enter the SPL portion of the competitions just as a joke (it doesn't cost anything extra as long as I am entered in the sound quality portion) and people make fun of my car in SPL -- they gather round and pretend to hold the doors and windshield in place to prevent the incredible sound pressure from breaking the window glass. :-) I won my division because I was the only car entered in that class. (However, to make up for my lack of SPL, I generally kick butt in the sound quality portion of the competition)

The loudest car that competes locally topped out in testing at 169 decibels, but only managed 166 decibels in official competition. It's a big Chevrolet Dualie truck with 18 kilowatts (perhaps I should say kill-o-watts?) feeding twelve 15" subwoofers, if I remember correctly. He uses a 100 watt amplifier as a pre-amplifier to feed six 3000 watt amplifiers that run the speakers. There are no other speakers in the vehicle, so he doesn't do too well in the sound quality portion of the competition. The system can only be run for about five seconds at a time, then has to cool down for several minutes. It is not at all uncommon for some part of the system to quit working when all of the smoke leaks out of it. Crazy.

If you are getting over 150 decibels with an in-dash mounted player, that is better than most of our local competitors do. For whatever reason, it seems like most of the CD players mounted in-dash start skipping at about 141 decibels. The serious competitors have a podium that they mount outside the vehicle containing the audio source unit. The really serious ones use a signal tone generator instead of a CD player -- they find the resonant harmonic frequency of the inside of the vehicle, and send a pure tone at that frequency to maximize their SPL. They're all crazy.

For those of you who have never watched an SPL competition, it's an amazing sight. When the big rigs light off, they set off car alarms in parking lots across the street. Because it is necessary to completely seal off the passenger compartment to maximize SPL, they are not that loud on the outside -- the whole car vibrates and blurs slightly, and the noise of all the rattling body panels is actually louder (outside the car, remember) than the stereo. After a summer of SPL competition, even a new car is literally falling apart as all the bolts and nuts have been rattled loose. I'm telling you, they're all CRAZY!

So, Firestarter, o Crazy One, good luck in your competitions. I wouldn't mind seeing you light that rig of yours off a few times. Guess I must be a little bit crazy myself.

tanstaafl.









"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"