Here we go again

[The Man Himself <altruist@shoko.calarts.edu>]

I've got another Echoplex wierdness alert:

Just now, after leaving the Echoplex on unused for about twenty minutes, 
I tried recording a loop.  Without entering any sound in, and without 
having the threshold engaged, the thing automatically started recording 
once the engage button was pressed.

But now here's the wierd thing.  When I hit record again, I got a very 
nasty blst of digital white noise.  This happened several times in a 
row.  

I switched the thing off, and upon re-powering all was well (at least it 
seems that way).  Now, is this something anybody's ever heard of?  I've 
never run into this anomaly before.  Will this be solved by clipping the 
internal thermal thing?

I also noticed a few days ago that a loop which was running decayed to 
almost total silence over the course of some fifteen to twenty minutes, 
but the feedback control was definitely all the way to the right.  I've 
read that when more and more overdubs are put into the loops that the 
feedback is automatically scaled back to aout 95%; is that what I'm 
looking at now?

Any advice greatly appreciated,

--Andre