Greetings!

1. No. I do not know the seller, but this is a popular site for the empeg and there were a lot of sellers recently.

2. You are probably better waiting until Patrick's board is available. I would recommend it from the linux prompt and kernel use. During average playback, it may or may not help you much.

3. I thought the cutoff value was more based on the encoder that was used and a command line switch that was required to get LAME to encode above 16kHz. I am not aware of the fix you speak of, but it would not be the first time I missed anything.

4. The 303 fascias are no longer made, and have not been for a while. There is another fascia project in the works though in the project section that looks very promising!

5. Hardware tweaks - test completely, new hard drives, rebuild the partitions manually (leaving a bit of extra space for a potentially larger dynamic data partition), decide if you want alpha 3 or enhanced 2 code. Otherwise, you can add as you go. Not sure if you want digital out, but that is another possibility. Illuminated button hacks are highly recommended, even if you do not have the translucent buttons yet.

6. Speculation continues, but he did post a photograph of an injury he sustained on the board. Granted, it could have been a human he captured or perhaps he is now a borg. You would need to get that answer from him directly.