Ho hum. So I just walked into Cambridge Car Audio carrying my recalcitrant Dension and persuaded them to let me plug it into their indoor car-stereo connector, in order to find out whether my loose connection was in the stereo or in the car. I fully expected this experiment to tell me that the stereo was perfectly all right and the car's wiring was at fault, since that seemed only reasonable given that the car was the bit that had changed recently. Then I was going to go back to Wests and demand that they made a better job of fixing their loose connections, this time armed with clear proof that the stereo wasn't the faulty component.

Except that, as it turns out, the results of the experiment went the other way, and it is the Dension that's broken. Bah. I was really hoping not to have to send it away for repairs, since that's always a staggeringly annoying pain in the wossname.

Worse still, I asked CCA whether there were any other hard-disk based MP3 car stereos on the market, and they said yes, there were about three of them, with disk sizes ranging from 10Gb to 16Gb and prices starting at 600 quid. The Dension has a still-fairly-small 20Gb disk and cost me 400, and I thought that was bad! So it looks as if I'm stuck with trying to get the Dension fixed, on all counts. Sigh.