I was getting some alternator whine through my empeg on my Boxster, and so I started troubleshooting.
First thing I did was to replace the little blue taps I was using with soldering the power/ground wires. Did that. Still get the whine.

Next, I pulled out the Empeg sleeve. Uh-oh, there's a yellow wire and it's pin dangling in the back. Upon close inspection, the yellow wire with pin completely came out of the docking connector (I believe that this is pin 1 of the connector, which is the permanent 12V line). This pin should lock into the connector and not come out. The locking flange of the pin was folded back on itself, so there wasn't an edge to engage in the connector body, the fold of the copper was too smooth to catch. I carefully folded it back to its original position and inserted the pin back into the connector. I still get some noise. I measured the voltage with the key off, and it is indeed 12V.

So a couple of questions:

1. Anyone else seen this pin disengage from the connector?
2. After the Empeg has put itself to sleep when the car is shut off (I mean after the 60 second timeout), is the little
light supposed to stay on that is on the upper right of the Empeg? Should I be able to manually turn the Empeg
on without using the ignition signal? (I can't turn it on manually after the time out.)
3. If I do have a problem with permanent 12V, will the unit run from the ig sense input? (I'm not sure how long the
yellow wire was out of the connector, I could have pulled it out when I was soldering.)
4. Since my power does look OK, any other suggestions on getting rid of the whine? It's noticable when I have
the empeg on pause and volume turned up really loud (above about +23 for those of you with Becker units). Is
a power filter the only other solution? If I can also draw power from Ig. sense, then do I need to filter both?

thanks.

-gbeck

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