The problem with mine was when I uploaded 8a on top of 8a it zero'd out all the stored settings that it last used like the volume and display settings.

This could happen sometimes on the 7b->8(a) transition. It shouldn't happen on future upgrades. We did a major reorganisation of the information stored in flash on power fail and it seems that the code that should have converted old settings to the new format may have failed sometimes.

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Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)