Not necessarily, but that's certainly one possible explanation. Have you looked to see if any of the pins inside the ethernet port on the player have been bent?

Also try plugging the empeg straight into the PC as a diagnostic step. Usually that requires a crossover cable, but some ethernet ports on PC's can autosense crossover, or they can be manually put into crossover mode by a setting in the control panel. If yours is one, then perhaps that's worth trying.