Okay, so after looking through the various posts that refer to issues with Phatboxes that skip, I'm starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that my issue is with my cable, but on the other hand, maybe not...
The hardware: A really early Phatbox (like, serial number 52 or something on my 10G DMS), connected to a stock Symphony head unit in a 2001 Audi S4, using the "new" Phatbox-to-Audi cable, not the one that originally came with the Phatbox (I did get the new cable from Phatnoise- iirc, it became a requirement when they upgraded the firmware to fix the delayed-reaction/missed button press issues that plagued the thing from the start).
My scenario is this: As I'll be driving, my music will occasionally drop out. It might come back in a second or two, or it might take almost a minute. Sometimes it'll drop out again soon after, sometimes it'll continue to work flawlessly (for up to 45 minutes at a minumum- I rarely have drives that last longer than that). I should probably point out that I don't always get dropouts- sometimes, I can drive for 45 minutes with no trouble at all.
Here's where my scenario starts to diverge from what I was able to find by searching the forums: Sometimes, after a dropout, my Phatbox will sort of lose its mind. It'll decide that it can only play like 5 songs on a playlist that's 99 songs deep, and of those 5, it'll only play some portion of each song...so, it might play A seconds of track V, B seconds of track W, C seconds of track X, D seconds of track Y, and E seconds of track Z...then it'll go back to track V, and start over with A seconds of track V, B seconds of track W, and so on. When it gets into this mode, it always plays the same fragment of each track that it feels comfortable playing, but it never recovers on its own. If I switch playlists, it just stops playing altogether. I can usually get it out of this mode by pulling the DMS and then re-inserting it.
Another failure mode I see (which may be just an edge case of the one above) is, after skipping, the track counter will just run through the numbers quickly, but won't actually play anything. If I'm in random mode at the time, the numbers will sequence randomly, but if I'm in sequential mode, it'll count 1..N and then start over. In this mode, if I try to switch playlists, I get a similar thing: Pressing "2" on my head unit gets me the familiar "The current playlist is..." prompt, but then the track counter just runs amok as it was when I was in normal play mode. As above, I can usually get the Phatbox out of this mode by pulling the DMS and then re-inserting it. Having said that, SOMETIMES (twice so far in the last 2 years, I think), I have to actually disconnect the cable from the back of the Phatbox and reconnect it, which has the unfortunate side effect of possibly blowing the fuse on the back of the head unit if I can't get the connector lined up correctly before I try to engage it.
So- Does all of this sound like the sort of thing that cable flakiness could cause? If so, I can hard-wire my cable to my Phatbox- my soldering skills are such that I don't fear this...I just don't want to have to extricate my Phatbox from my car, because getting it in there in the first place sucked, and not in a good way.
Is there a chance that I'm just seeing flakiness related to a hard drive that's been subjected to operation in a vehicle that is, shall we say, driven with gusto, through temperatures that swing from below zero to well over 100 degrees inside the car over the course of the year? If the Phatbox is having trouble reading from the hard drive, does it attempt to log these errors, and if so, where?
Has anyone seen solder joint flakiness on the PCB that might interrupt comms between the Winbond MCU and the ARM, causing the rebootifier to engage?
Enquiring minds want to know, and more importantly, enquiring minds want to listen to their music all the way through.
-c
