I'll try to answer most of the questions in one post if I can.

Nic - The bad vibes on the Dension board were largely caused by me ! I was getting really fed up with waiting for the new firmware which was eventually released about 6 weeks after it was "days" away. They certainly have taken some flak over the delays, which they deserved. I believe that they released the product too early, but I guess they wanted to start getting some cash coming in. They also do a Neo type standalone harddisk product which can interface with the DH20* CD/Tuner headunit and it appears that there have been problems with that too. I don't know if those have been solved.

JaBZ- AFAIK The drive is a standard 2.5" notebook drive. I don't see why it couldn't be upgraded - it's just a FAT32 drive.

msaeger - I will take some pictures but will I be lynched if I post them here ?!

tman - I used to live in Coventry, I have grown a beard and am living in Goa now!


Tony- none of the above !

Albumplay would more accurately by called directory play and how it works depends on how you have your files arranged. If you are playing random tracks in any mode (playlist,myradio or manually chosen tracks/directory) and hit albumplay, it replaces the current track with all tracks (in alphabetical filename order) that are in the same directory as the current track, and immediately starts playing the first of these. After all of those tracks are played is resumes playing the track after the one playing when albumplay was hit.

I have my files arranged Music\Artist\Trackname.mp3 so in my case albumplay causes the current track to be replaced by all tracks by that artist in alphabetical order of track name.

If you had files arranged Music\Artist\Album\trackno_trackname.mp3 hitting albumplay would replace the current track with all tracks from that album in track number order and then revert to the next track in the original random list.

As to features that I miss from the Empeg, I have to be honest, I don't think I really scratched the surface of what the Empeg could do, especially in terms of searches etc. This was mainly because I wasn't happy using the main remote while driving. I set up playlists for me and my GF containing our respective favourite tracks and another for those that we both liked. Generally we selected them for whoever was in the car and just let them play in shuffled mode. For me the Dension can now do that just as well, with the added bonus of changing between them with a single button press. I think for hard-core Empeg users there would probably be lots of features missing (for example, you can only search for a specific track by navigating to it in the file structure - so ZZtop tracks would take a while to get to if you wanted to individually select them) but for the way I want to use it, it's fine.

One feature that the Dension has that the Empeg doesn't is the customisable display for both content and colour. There is a screen editor program that lets you select what you want to display, what text size, and where on the screen you want it. You can also select normal or inverse display for the individual parts.The customisable colour really is a killer feature for me as I really like have the unit match the dash lighting. With the Dension as well as several factory colour choices you can define one "User" colour and actually adjust the individual RGB settings to get any colour you like. As I said I even have mine set so that it is LCD green (actually light yellow from the standard colours)in day mode and VW blue (my user colour to get an exact match) at night. Matching the dash lighting may not be the most important thing in an audio system to most people, but, after several attempts to match VW blue on the Empeg, it makes me smile to finally achieve it! It also means that when you change cars you can simply program in a new colour.