I have had the EMPEG installed for about a month now, and still have no way to get rid of Alternator whine, Speaker pop (on Power ON/OFF), and the digitized noise at all times when car is on or off. I have a BMW 99 M3 and I bought a brand new A/D/S/ P840.2 amp for the occasion. The digitized noise is the most annoying of it all because on slow songs that don't have a lot of treble it is horrible. The digitized noise does not change with volume or RPM, it is constant. The alternator stays the same volume but frequency changes with RPM. And the loud spike is there when I power it off and on, but mostly off. I have tried the grounding RCA's as directed, and that just seems to make the digitized noise worst and the sound somewhat muffled. I have pulled the EMPEG out and taped up everything that is/isn't being used and the back of the harness as well. I have the unit mounted in the glove box and the engine noise is there if I am holding the unit in my hand in the car with the glove box out as well. I have also tried isolators (from pyramid) and that made the sound terrible. I am completely out of options. I had the unit professionally installed and from what I can tell, they wired the power to some accessory power and used the in-line power filter (at first they didn't and I had speaker pops when I hit the brakes, turn-on anything...). The ground is however going straight back to the GND of the AMP in the trunk, as is the Remote AMP on wire. I am only using the rear outputs of the EMPEG and taped up everything metal (includeing the gold RCA connectors). I have the factory deck going to the input of the EMPEG and I switched the jumpers on the board over from 1V input to 4V input. Does anyone have any suggestions or see anything that I have left out?

-Jason Sarich
Sunnyvale, CA #00018

The pops on power off are easy to solve (or, at least, reduce them significantly) - fit 1K resistors between signal and ground for each of the line outputs. This is most conveniently achieved within the RCA connectors on the grounding cables, but you'll need to be able to solder or find someone that can.

Rob

Hey Jason,
I live in Sunnyvale too. You can try your empeg in my docking sled sometime for troubleshooting if you want. I dont have a noice problem in my Honda Del Sol. Let me know... good luck, JON

que #907 EMPEG S/N:00078 (10gig) Sunnyvale, California

Well,

I was reading previous posts, and one person said that they had a Z3 with HK system and the empeg. And their solution to the engine whine was to use the grounding RCA's at the Empeg and ground it to the sled of the empeg. Guess what? IT WORKED! I was amazed, and the whine is gone. The only problem is still the speaker pop when the power goes on/off to it. I soldered a 1K - 1/2 watt resistor (only thing I could find at Radio Shack) between the ground and negative terminal of the RCA on the cable that EMPEG supplied and tested it at the deck, and at the amp, and still no dice.

The other thing is the digitized noise is still there. Even with the EMPEG on without the engine on or in my house, there is a digitized noise (you know, like an amplified mouse chewing on something). It is there with the playback of MP3's and if I switch over to the radio (through the AUX). I think that there is something not filtering within my EMPEG or something. Because nobody seems to complain about this noise. My roomate has an empeg, and he has question the sound too. Has anyone come accross this problem?

The other thing is the digitized noise is still there. Even with the EMPEG on without the engine on or in my house, there is a digitized noise (you know, like an amplified mouse chewing on
something). It is there with the playback of MP3's and if I switch over to the radio (through the AUX). I think that there is something not filtering within my EMPEG or something. Because nobody
seems to complain about this noise. My roomate has an empeg, and he has question the sound too. Has anyone come accross this problem?

Actually, I know exactly what you are talking about, though I can't say that I can help with your problem at all. When I took my empeg out of the box, and hooked it up to my Cambridge speakers for my CPU, the little demo song that it played had the same problem. There was just this "background static" kind of noise, although it wasn't really static, it was exactly as you said it was... like little rodents playing around in the box while the music was going on. I could still hear the music, but just with this noise in the background.

Well, I nuked that file, upgraded to every version incrementally (finishing with 8a), then uploaded my own songs. I'm not sure if the sample song was just a bad encode, but my songs sounded perfect. Crystal clear. I even jacked the volume up on my stereo to near ear-explosion-levels, and still sounded fine.

Are you running the most recent version? That's all I can think of that I did at all to the software to get it to play the tracks clearly.. and this was before it was even hooked up to my Jeep. (Incindentally - I have no problems with interference in my Jeep... even this "nasty power-off pop" isn't really noticable.. of course I only have a piece of junk 50W amp that powers my piece of junk speakers. I suppose now that I dropped a grand on a stereo, I can justify dropping 500$ on some decent speakers... heh)

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S/N: 00246 6GB Blue