That and the fact that if you turn off the ignition, keep the player playing, then restart the car, the empeg reboots but won't play any sound....

They were never able to reproduce that particular problem. They've said they think that's fixed in the current internal build. But before this fix went in, I stopped being able to reproduce it with my car, so I have no way of being able to reliably test it for the alpha team. So I can't independently verify the fix.

.... that's an oldie and i can't recall the reason behind it... was it an amp thing??

No, it was the DSP's "mute" flag getting opposite-toggled and desynchronized from the "pause" function.