Mk2 Player noise

I have a Mk2 running the v509 hijack.

Occasionally, but becoming more frequent, my empeg will output a very loud static type noise, or go silent. The screen indicates whatever track is still playing and all buttons give the corresponding results on the screen. The only way to recover is to reboot (or 2 now!!) or pull and reseat the slede. To my recollection this only happens when in player mode and has never happened in radio mode, however when it happens switching between palyer and radio does not recover the situation.

Initially I thought that it might be my car wiring but if this were the case I would have though rebooting would not correct the situation, and it would happen on radio as well as player.

Does anyone have any advice please.

Very interesting set of symptoms.

Clarification: When you say that "rebooting" solves the problem, but then go on to say that in addition to rebooting, pulling it out of the sled and re-inserting it is sometimes required, what is your definition of "reboot"?

The reason I ask is that, for most people, pulling it out of the sled and re-inserting it is the way that you'd tend to reboot it. But because you make a distinction between the two, and because it might be an important symptom in the diagnosis, I'm curious what exactly you mean by "reboot" that's different than pulling it out of the sled and re-inserting it.

There are ways of rebooting it without pulling it out of the sled, and depending on which one you're using, it might help indicate whether the problem is a car-wiring thing or an internal-to-the-player thing. Another thing you could do is plug it into the AC adapter in the house, and listen to it from the RCA connectors. If the problem happens there too, then you can be certain it's not the car wiring at issue.

In the meantime, get us a boot log and a RAM test result, which might possibly help.

Thanks for the reply.

By reboot I mean reboot via the hijack menu and either rebooting (via the hijack menu) or pulling the slede cures the problem.

I will try the AC/home test and try and garb the boot log and RAM results.

Please find attached (most of) the boot log and RAM test results. Any help much appreciated.

Ah. Yes, then in that case, it's highly unlikely to related to the car's wiring. Since you're not doing anything that would jar the wiring or the sled.

There is one other thing it could be that's external to the player: Depending on the kind of static you're hearing, it could be an amplifier fault, which happens to get reset when the amp remote line goes low then high again due to the reboot. The AC/Home test, if it produces the noise, will rule this out for sure.

I'm betting it's a fault that's internal to the player. It may need repair of some kind. On the other hand, maybe it just needs a new hard disk. The boot log might help us figure that out. Oh, also make sure there's not a loose screw or some other obvious thing.

Here's a fun question that might help narrow down the location of the fault. When the noise happens, if you turn the player's volume up and down, does the noise increase and decrease in volume?

RAM Test looks good.

Boot log looks incomplete, maybe I downloaded the file wrong but it looks like we only got it going after it detected the disk drive. Can you get a more complete one?

There's an "error 6" complaint about one of the hard disk partitions (right after the normal reiserfs error that I'm not sure about. Don't know if that means anything or not. Other than that I don't see anything special here. My main concern was looking for obvious errors in the hard disk detection and I don't see that, at least not in the portion you posted.

Yes the log is incomplete due to the nature of my terminal program, I will try and find one that allows me to capture the whole thing.

The volume of the static is not controllable and is unbearably loud when it happens, but sometimes it just goes silent.

The player has been running for about 2.5 hours on AC with no faults, but this can happen in the car too. The testing continues....

What kind of amplifier are you using?

The amp is the Audi factory fit 4 channel Bose. I have had the empeg in the car for about 6 months, but this only started about 2 months ago.

Interesting. You also said that going from player to tuner and back again did not change the static.

The fact that you cannot control the volume of the static (and that it tends to sound like it's at the full amplifier volume) means that the problem is somewhere after the DSP stage. Meaning it still could theoretically be the car's amplifier, and the reason it resets with a reboot is because of the amp remote line resetting like I said.

Question: Does the static have a "digital" kind of quality to the noise, or does it sound like analog amplifier static? Not sure how to describe the difference, but I guess digital noise might have some kind of a pitch or buzz component to it, whereas analog static would just be pure white noise static, like a radio tuned to a nonexistent station.

If you were really brave, you could also dig into your dash, and plug a portable player into the RCA cables that run to the amp. If you get the noise that way, then we've narrowed it down to "not the empeg's fault".

Hi,

Tony's right, but there is another path that the 4 pigtail connectors take in the Empeg. The 2 RCA jacks are ahead of the output drivers for the 4 separated RF, LF, RR, LR ouitputs. They take another additional path. The Right RCA is connected to the RF output of the DSP, the Left RCA is connected to the LR output of the DSP. Was the noise coming from both the front and rear speakers? The rear Amplifiers have a dedicated path that the RCAs will not see.

The output amplifiers and their associated Tantalum capacitors may be the problem. There was a thread we worked on that may help you if you want to play with your Empeg and troubleshoot it some. The complete path and other information related to this type of problem are discussed. The thread name is "Losing left audio channel" and starts with message# 333771. You might check it out.


Is the noise repetive and "chirpy" (like digital databus noise)? This sounds like the old Dial-up MODEM noise during the Training process where it evaluates and establishes the maximum data rate the phone data connection can sustain.

Is the noise a single tone (like a demodulated digital clock)?

Is the noise a loud burst of static-y noise or popping noise and then fades out (like analog noise from a dying coupling capacitor, a dying semiconductor junction, or a DC-bias shift in a bad Opamp feeding a coupling capacitor, or other circuit)?

Is the noise a buzz that changes pitch periodically (like the disk drive spin-up/spin-down) like a bad power decoupling capacitor, dying motor driver in the disk drive, or a bad regulator might cause?



Or is it just the type of music you listen to? <grin>

I have heard some music referred to in music reviews as the sound of a dentist drill, Black & Decker Drill, etc.... Some of mine fits into this category.



Ross

Bad tracks?

Thanks for all the replys.

The noise, when it happens, is white noise like an untuned TV or radio and is a constant volume (loud!!). When and how it manifests seems to be random;

The noise can be steady state white noise, or switching cyclically between white noise and silence with seeming regular intervals, or a very short blast of noise followed by silence.

I have not tried to determine if it is comming out of all 4 speakers, I'll try that if I get an opportunity.

It can happen at first switch on of the car, and thus empeg, before the boot process has completed, and before any music has started to play. It does not appear to be related to any particular track, playlist, album, or artist, or to the movement of the car. Some days, like today, everything was perfect, another day it can happen 3 or 4 times in a short trip.

As I mentioned before I cannot recall it ever happening in radio mode.

I have tried switching off auto volume, loudness, and flat lining the equaliser (very dull) but to no avail.

No, because he said that when the noise does happen, if he switches to the radio and back again, the noise stays.

Wait. Now that I think about it... maybe I'm making an assumption about what he meant. He didn't really make it clear whether the noise continued to stay even during the time when it was in the radio mode, or if it went to normal sounding radio and then back to noise on the player application.

Clearly if he meant the latter, then it's definitely just bad tracks or hard disk trouble and we can just stop our diagnostics right now.

Graynada, please clarify: When you said that, did you mean it went like this?

- You are playing MP3s.
- Noise starts.
- You switch to radio.
- Noise keeps going while it's in radio mode.
- You switch back to MP3 player.
- Noise keeps going.

In other words, once the noise starts, it doesn't stop even when the player is in Radio mode?

Yes that is what I meant, once the noise starts the only way to stop it is to reboot, nothing else works.

Excellent. Then it's definitely not bad tracks or a bad hard disk or something like that. The noise isn't in the data, it's in the electronics somewhere. Now we need to be sure whether it's in the electronics of the player or the amplifier.

If you have access to the remote amp line, try disconnecting it when the noise starts and then reconnect it. This would effectively "reboot" (really power cycle) the amp. It would at least prove/disprove the theory mentioned.

If the amp is accessible and is fused itself, you could try removing/replacing the fuse. I'd be a little more wary of doing this though. It might generate a nasty speaker thump.

Thanks for this I will definitly give this a go as it will determine if it is the empeg or the car that is giving me the trouble. Access isn't easy but when I get time to dig around in the dash I'll jury rig a switch so I can control the amp. I'll have to wait to do this though because apparently "fitting a sink, restoring the water supply and finishing the kitchen" is more important than my empeg playing up occassionally. Funny how different people have different priorities.

I have fitted a switch to the amp remote line and no amount of swithing on and off of this switch, with suitable pauses between each operation, recovers the sound.

However the fault has developed now in that it is more frequent, it is happening in radio mode, rebooting via the hijack menu will not fix it, and I get more short noise and silence that continual noise.

I am thinking that the cars amp is OK and that my problem lies with my empeg(?).

It really sounds like some part is ceasing to function once it warms up. Since it affects both (stereo) channels, this means it pretty much has to be a component that is common to both, which rules out a lot of stuff.

I supppose the DSP chip might have developed a bad solder joint somehow, possibly on its clock circuitry. One way to test for that, might be to use a small bit of programming code that reads known-good values back from the DSP. If the chip is dead, those values will be bad.

This might best be done from the Hijack menu, but no such code is there today. I'll think about it, but no promises.

Cheers

Mmm.. on further examination, the DSP inside the Mk2a appears to be a write-only device. I cannot read anything meaningful back from it.

But.. at least it does respond to the I2C read cycles, ACKing when required. If it were dead, it wouldn't do even that. So we now have a test for a functioning DSP.

This special hijack kernel now performs that test as part of the Vital Signs display (from the Hijack menu). If the DSP fails to respond, it prefixes the model name with a minus sign.

Eg. if you see this, it's toast: -Mk2a
Whereas this means all okay: Mk2a

-ml

Sure sounds like it! Good diagnostic.

If you are certain that it's not a simple wiring problem then I'd bet it's time to have someone look inside the player.

Many thanks for the special kernel, I'll give it a go and see what happens.

I did have a fiddle with the wiring when I was fitting the amp switch but I didn't get to the back of the slede. I'll whip the sled out and have a poke about when I can slip away from kitchen fitting duties.

I hoping to receive a Rio shortly which again should aid diagnostics.

I have installed the special kernel and I had the sled out and had a look at the connector as described in the faqs. Some of the crimps didn't look too clever, in particular the ignition sense and the amp remote, with a lot of cores not held in the crimp.

I did some soldering but I had to be pretty minamilist to be able to refit the connectors to the plug. Ideally I would like to have remade the connections. Does anyone know what the name and/or manufacturer of this connector is as I would like to try and get some new crimps.

This week will see if what I have done so far has made any difference, and if not give me chance to inspect the flag Mark added to the kernel.

I've had my first noise experience with the v509+ kernel and no -ve in front of the Mk2 in Vital Signs. So it looks like the player could be alright, and I need to concentrate on the sled connector?

Yup. It could still be something internal, but the connector is the obvious first suspect.

An update:

Since my soldering on the slede connector the instances of noise got a lot less. I expect there were other joint(s) that needed attention.

A lot of past tense in that last sentence because my permanent cure has been to repalce the empeg with a Kenwood KDC-BT60U

Pros;
I now have radio reception, my tuner unit never really gave anything that could be classed as reception.
LW radio so I can keep an ear on Test Match Special (a UK cricket program) at relevant times.
Bluetooth (built in Parrot) hands free and audio streaming that to my surprise and delight has worked seamlessly with my Android phone.
Change the display colours to match my dsah exactly, a small cosmetic thing but still nice.

Cons;
No real playlist support, to get what I want I have to manual order and copy songs to a pen stick. It can do a 'playlist' thing through the Kenwood Music Editor Lite but this only allows selection and search by artist or album. I am trying to get hold of the full version since I haven't been able to work out how to open the Lite version database to manually manipulate it to make real playlists.
The controls are not as intuative as the empeg, and not consistent across functions.
There is a slight but noticable pause between MP3 tracks which is annoying during albums that merge one track into another like Misplaced Childhood, MoS Chilled.

I do miss my empeg and apart from radio reception and 'the noise' issue has been a joy to use, but I am enjoying the Kenwood too.

However, with the exception of the Bluetooth, a user would have trouble identifying the advances in technology in the 10+ years between the two!!