I bought an ET3-SE +phono and took delivery two days before Christmas, 2011. Every light on the front panel lit up like my christmas tree. Nothing worked right. I spoke with Ed personally 1/3/12 and it took irate phone calls to the salesman to get any kind of response, 7/12. Six months. During this time, I would consistently lose volume. It finally shamed cj enough to respond to my concerns. Here is one of Eds replies: " There are a couple of causes for odd behavior by a remote controllable preamp. One is a voltage fluctuation
of the AC coming out of the wall socket. This is most likely after a power interruption. Another is static electricity, especially in cold weather.
The cure for both is to unplug the unit from the AC for 90 seconds or so, which will let the affected microprocessor to reset. To prevent the problems, for the AC fluctuation, if at all possible, unplug the preamp from the wall socket when there is a power outage. For the static, the best way is to discharge yourself on something not connected to your system. One thing to try is running a piece of generic speaker wire to the screw holding the wall plate on the AC outlet (make sure that the screw is not painted over, as then it would not conduct). If you have wool or synthetic carpet in your listening room, spritz the carpet with Sta-Puff laundry treatment (this actually works). Or, if it is visually acceptable, put bamboo mats over the carpet near your equipment stand. What we find more and more to be a cause of erratic preamp behavior these days is having a Wi-Fi device or a laptop with a remote port on the same room as the preamp. These can "talk" to the preamp and make it do odd things. If you have either or both, remove it/them from the room (if possible) and note if the preamp still has a problem. If that is not practical, move the preamp to another room, and observe it there. The problems you describe are almost certainly caused by one of the above factors."
I sent the preamp back to cj, they've had it two weeks and not a word. CJ is certainly aware of this problem so buyer beware!
