But according to Tanstaafl, the empeg has temperature monitoring circuitry that will prevent the hard drives from spinning up if these temperature limits are exceeded.

There was another thread on this subject recently. Anyone have that link?

In that thread, it was revealed that, at the current time, despite what it says at the Empeg web site (which is where tanstaafl got his information), this feature is commented out in the software because of some problems with it. So it tries to spin up the hard disk and play MP3s even when the temperature is outside the allowed range.

So I'd recommend leaving the Empeg turned off in subzero temperatures until they can get around to fixing those bugs and re-implementing the feature.

In a related note, I have a suspicion that the lack of this feature might have indirectly led to the failure of one of my hard disks. I'm not trying to accuse and point fingers (in fact, if true, it's my fault anyway), but shortly before my hard disk failed, I had replaced my home entertainment center to accept a new TV set. The new cabinet had the tuner/amplifier inside a closed space behind glass doors instead of in the open air as the previous one did. Because of logistical reasons, I had taken to placing the Empeg inside this cabinet, resting it atop the tuner/amp unit, closing the door, then letting the Empeg play. Because of the enclosed space and the heat from the tuner/amp, the Empeg would get pretty hot. I paid little attention to this, assuming that it would shut itself down if the heat were a problem. Now that I know otherwise, I wonder if the heat really did cause the damage? I've had improperly-cooled hard disks in my file servers fail, so I know that heat can definitely damage a hard disk...

___________
Tony Fabris