ok, i have searched the FAQ and the BBS thoughly, and i cant find an answer.
I have had my player back from support about a month and have just gotten my database to a healthy size. today i went through and cleaned up some and went to stab it back into the sled and after it booted there was no audio. The display suggests that everything is business as usual, but still no audio.
i brought the player back onto the house and hooked it up to my stereo, no audio.
I stressed out drank a beer and sat back to assess the situation.
so far i have:

I have tried to reboot it countless times, i have tried to reload the firmware (beta 11 in case anyone is intrested) and still i have no luck. I hope someone can offer some solutions, please. My worst fear is that the output chip is blown, or something horrific like that. i have not cracked the player open yet. i am hoping that it wont be nessissary. here is the boot log as well.

empeg-car bootstrap v1.02 20001106 ([email protected])
If there is anyone present who wants to upgrade the flash, let them speak now,
or forever hold their peace...it seems not. Let fly the Penguins of Linux!

e000 v1.04
Copying kernel...
Calling linux kernel...
Uncompressing Linux..................................... done, booting the kerne
l.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg50 ([email protected]) (gcc versi
on 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #8 Fri Feb 8 18:48:15 GMT 2002
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 10101989)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15024k/16M available (964k code, 20k reserved, 372k data, 4k init)
Dentry hash table entries: 2048 (order 2, 16k)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 16384 (order 4, 64k)
Page cache hash table entries: 4096 (order 2, 16k)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea Universit
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 16384 bhash 16384)
IrDA (tm) Protocols for Linux-2.2 (Dag Brattli)
Linux-IrDA: IrCOMM protocol ( revision:Tue May 18 03:11:39 1999 )
ircomm_tty: virtual tty driver for IrCOMM ( revision:Wed May 26 00:49:11 1999 )
Starting kswapd v 1.5
SA1100 serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0xf8010000 (irq = 15) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS01 at 0xf8050000 (irq = 17) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS02 at 0xf8030000 (irq = 16) is a SA1100 UART
Signature is 206f6972 'rio '
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
empeg audio-in initialised, CS4231A revision a0
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 0000
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0004900).
empeg RDS driver initialised
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: IBM-DARA-212000, 11513MB w/418kB Cache, CHS=23392/16/63
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x3349
smc9194.c:v0.12 03/06/96 by Erik Stahlman ([email protected])

SMC9194: SMC91C94(r:9) at 0x4008000 IRQ:7 INTF:TP MEM:6144b MAC 00:02:d7:22:07:c
5
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k init player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-be
ta11 2002/02/08.
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Feb 7 2002
Vcb: 0x4086d000