I got a new car stereo at the weekend, to replace my Dension DH102 which packed up in April. I was unable to get another DH102 or anything like it: players with their own hard disks seem to have gone totally out of fashion, and even Dension don't sell them any more. Instead, the new fashion is stereos which have an iPod connection; so I now have an Alpine CDE-9850Ri, and an iPod to plug into it. I haven't yet worked out whether I prefer this to the Dension.

( car stereo comparison )

Particularly bad about the last two points (in fact, quite possibly the last three) is that as far as I can tell they're fundamental limitations imposed by the iPod-based design, which means that no other stereo on the market will be able to fix them for me.

On the plus side, I suppose, that means I don't have to worry about whether I should have bought some other model instead. But it is rather annoying me that I can visualise exactly what my ideal car stereo would do, and none of its features seem obviously specialist to me, and yet nobody is prepared to sell me anything remotely like it. If I were more of a hardware person I might have given serious thought to building my own.