Okay, this has been bugging me for a bit and I finally got the time to troubleshoot. Basically, shortly after staring the player in the car, when I first leave the house, the right channel would always cut out (I only use the front leads, rears were removed, this is a miata). The right speaker would only emit this loud hiss, accompanyed by loud popping when pausing/unpausing the song. The only way around the problem seemed to be rebooting the empeg (pull it out and put it back in). I would have to resort to the 'reboot' a couple times more in the next few minutes (gotten worse over time) until things 'heated up' as I could tell. I've since tested the following:

- switched RCA left/right at the amp, left speaker would then cut out, problem is before the amp

- Unplugged RCA when channel cut out and hiss goes away, so hiss is comming from source (empeg)

- New RCA cables so they aren't the problem

- Unplugged my RPM/Tach serial sender unit, unplugged AUX input source, pulled wiring out so I could lay the dock on the center console. No wire pulling/movement and problem still occurs

- Brought empeg inside, listened through computer/headphones and right channel is staticy as well until a reboot.

Unless I'm crazy, there is something in the empeg behind this problem. My guess is a dry solder somewhere on the board for the right channel but I don't know where to start looking as all the solder connection are so small .

Anyhow else experience this. Any ideas of where I should start looking for a bad connection? Before/after the DSP? Before after the DAC? Everything looks good but I've only removed the HD drive at looked from above at this point, haven't removed the main board to get a better look.

I saw posts related to this at one time but I've been searching for 2 hours as haven't found anything.