Well today finished the final event of the autocross season so I can do some real debugging. My right channel problems is gone but I did two things at the same time. I was pushing on connections, etc. but I also reloaded the 2.0 developer's image. I forgot that I still had my own 2.0 kernel on there though I had the additional features turned off on boot. There may have been an unintialized value or something. My modifications allowed a userspace application to hijack a small portion of the display for its own use. It also collected information over the serial port about rpm/speed/topup or down and used that to change sound parameters. (volume for now, EQ was planned but its been 2 years and Phillips won't give me the DSP EQ parameter information I want).

Anyhow, that problem seems to have disappeared for now. As for the hard drive issue, I only got the problem once, while playing with the empeg, as I plugged the cable in one-off, but that was an easy fix.

However there are two other problems to work on.

1)

Jjust since I've had the player put out some nasty screeches, similar to what I've had with bad MP3 files but on files thay have plenty of plays on them. I did notice a small metal thing on my work desk today... hmmm... hey that's one of the hard drive mounting plate screws. Thinking that the extra bouncing caused possibile bad reads from the HD leaving those nasty gaps in the MP3 playback.

2)

A constant 'hiss' in the high end (tweeters) that does not change volume with source volume but goes away when I unplug the RCAs from the amp. I'm going to play with the amp gains/other sources to see if the noise is pre/post amp.

Gotta love the car audio environment. I'm suprised there isn't more noise with all the cables squished back behind the miata's dash.