so what you are saying is that cutting power to the ACC line merely jumps it into standby mode which you can then jump out of manually

Correct.

Then all I have to do to turn it off again is put it back into standby mode manually and it'll automatically shut down completely after however many seconds you set the standby time to?

Not certain about that behavior, never tested it. At worst, it will just stay in standby mode.

But... say I want to turn the Empeg back on from a full shutdown

Then you need the key. This is by design. In practice, you rarely ever have to do this.

For altering its behavior in these situations, simply massage the standby time in Emplode. To make it behave like a regular stereo (always completely shuts on and off with the key), set the standby time to something very short (say, 3 seconds). To make it stay in standby indefinitely, set the standby time very high. I don't remember what the upper limit is for the standby time, but in Beta 11, it should be properly bounds-checked now and won't mess up the player any more if you set it too hight (there was a bug fix, you see. ).