altman said the "reboot" voltage is something ridiculously low like 6V, but what exactly is the "noncritical" voltage cut off limit, ie, the limit for the unit switching off the screen/saving to flash but NOT rebooting entirely? it must be pretty high - id estimate 10.5 to 11v? i have a pretty good spiral cell battery in my car and the audio system of course has its own 4ga feed directly from the battery - power to my empeg is branched off this feed - so no mucking about with the car's factory supply. i dont get any problems with lights coming on and off, or doors opening etc - but starting the car will cause the battery icon to come up, and stay up for another4 seconds or so, but of course the car's voltage probably DOES drop below 11v when youre cranking anyway. (however my old JVC deck seemed to stay on and play without being interrupted no matter if i was in the middle of starting the car or not - too bad the empeg is not like this! understandably tho the empeg has got a lot more sensitive components onboard)

it just may be that the dome light and the feed to the empeg (in the case of the jeep owners) may be on the same feed? in my car, the original headunit power feed was also tied into the cigarette lighter, ie shorting that out also killed the HU power. so, perhaps the dome light (surely it is more than 5w) coming on, is enough to momentarily drop voltage below the "noncritical" standby cutoff voltage hence turning your empeg seemingly off, then on again, with battery icon. is your dome light also connected to additional courtesy illumination lights in the doors as well? that all light up when you open the door? it might all add up to a large momentary drop in voltage...?)

the problem(?) just seems that this 'noncritical' cutoff voltage on the empeg is pretty high... so it doesnt take too much of a drop, to make it panic and blank out.

a seperate situation can be seen at home - here in NZ the home power voltage is 220/240v, which rendered my 120v AC adaptor that came with the empeg, rather useless. i forget how many amps the factory adaptor is now, but im sure it was over an amp. 1.2amps? standard adapters for running powered speakers, and walkmans, and that sorta thing, normally are built to provide about 500mA. with just the one 10gb HDD in the system, running on a 800mA adapter that i dug up, the unit was having troubles running - it would boot up, and sit fine, but any HDD activity (eg, uploading a song) would blank the screen and then come back up again, as altman stated, "The player continues running, and if power hasn't actually gone away, it will re-enable the amps and screen & show the battery icon." which is exactly what happens. i assume the current (amperage) draw was large enough to cause a corresponding drop in voltage which then made the unit blank off, then come back again.

i changed to a large benchtop power supply, that does 12V at 5A, and it now is fine.

id really have to say that a capacitor/diode solution may be whats needed to stabilise the voltage, when those lights are coming on and off - it only needs to smooth the voltage for a split second, so maybe something as large as 1F may not be necessary, but you can only try smaller values and work up from there? maybe a 12V 0.2F to begin with... those are still pretty large tho.

ok i'll stop now.