The two U.S. satellite radio carriers became one at the end of July, but the monopoly has not had a smooth ride. After a few multi-million dollar golden parachutes payoffs, the combined company is in debt to the sad tune of over $2 billion. Neither was turning a profit prior to the merger, and the long-term outlook has SIRI singing the blues. Borrowing more money is near impossible right this moment and $400 million in convertible notes are due next year. (Sound like a GM-Ford merger to anyone?) Investors have punished the stock, sending its value below $1, risking delisting from NASDAQ. Just about everyone who wants satellite radio already has it, as hardware is already affordable. New cheaper ($4-$7/month) rate plans in hopes of bringing in new customers risks backfiring with current cash-strapped subscribers downgrading. The subscription-free competition is brutal: iPods, MP3-playing cell phones, OEM in-car jukeboxes, and terrestrial digital (HD) radio. Enjoy it while you can, but those satellites may be going dark in the not-so-distant future.
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I love my XM. Music from any genre I want, and I don’t have to screw around with an iPod to get it. All this and Rachel Maddow too.
If it goes under, it’ll bust my heart.
I like the concept of commercial-free radio (I refuse to listen to ads on radio or TV, and FM sounds like garbage anyway), and it is handy to have so many channels on a long drive, but they need to provide better sound quality than a 96 kb/s MP3. It’s painful to listen to. I’m waiting for the sound quality upgrade before I consider subscribing.
With a 6 CD stereo in the car capable of playing MP3s, I get to listen to exactly what I want when I want it. For talk radio, In Canada I switch to CBC, the public broadcaster available everywhere. I just don’t see the value in satellite radio. The one service I could find useful are marine weather reports, but they don’t offer it.
I listen to CNBC mostly on my XM. If there was only a way to get that one channel for $1.99 a month…
I had XM free for 6 months. One blues channel. One. Two channels of real jazz and one channel of elevator jazz. Rock and pop channels play the same crap that local FM plays, over and over and over. Sound quality sucked. The signal cut out every time I drove under a bridge or through hilly terrain, or during stormy weather (the meteorological condition, not the song). For the price of one month of XM, I can buy 3 used CD’s that I really want to hear from a local record store and put them on my Ipod to build up my own portable music library. At the present time I can play music from my Ipod for 11 days 17 hours and 31 minutes without hearing the same song twice. It’ll be even longer once I rip Jimmy Cliffs “The Harder They Come”. Only $4 used. And, it’s music I want to hear. Here’s a question. Why do some cars’ Ipod connection kits cost more than an Ipod costs?
Satelite radio will appeal to more subscribers in an a la carte fashion.
I’ve had Sirius from day one. Too bad they overpaid for content (such as sports, racing, etc…) that just don’t translate into a premium product on the radio.
Love the music and news though. The quality does suck I must agree.
I’d pay a few more bucks for HD Radio quality sound.
I love my XM, but I only listen to maybe 20 stations out of the 200 or so that are available to me. I got it because I liked thier dance stations (BPM 81 is great!) but I like the comedy and the decades etc. I sure hope they continue to offer the service. I don’t want to go back to the inane broadcasting of local Vancouver BC radio stations.
I like my XM too – although I only listen to 3 stations. It is really only worth it for the talk stations.
Their billing and customer service, however, is the worst I have ever come across.
I too enjoy my XM. Yes, I also listen only to a few stations.
If it goes bust, I may have to start buying music again…
I enjoy XM radio. Both cars have their own little Sportscaster unit. Amber display matches nicely and with the Mazda, it’s hardwired so no issues with an FM modulator or cig. lighter.
The service is well worth it in town and on long trips even with CD player and Aux input, a variety of stations and news. As a Houstonian living in Boise, I was able to listen to the Houston weather channel and get updates. Kinda cool to me.
I’d definitely be sad to see it go but it’s all business. The part I’ll miss the most is lack of adverts.
Pay for radio?
Well… actually… I do. When I’m not listening to my iPod, we have a great local Public Radio station that does contemporary music (The Current, 89.3 FM). I send them $50 about once a year, which is tax-deductible.
Sirius-XM are not long for this world. They can’t even make it work as a monopoly and I predict they will be stone dead when in-car Internet will become popular in the next few years.
but they need to provide better sound quality than a 96 kb/s MP3. It’s painful to listen to
I gotta call you out on that. Both the Sirius and XM audio compression schemes are more robust than high-bit MP3 (and that is pretty good too). Unless you have a super-high-end aftermarket system, it will be difficult to hear a sound quality difference between CD and Satellite with a typical car audio system on the music stations. If you couple that with a moving car with road roar (tire, engine, and wind noise), all bets are off. HOWEVER, I do agree that dropouts are a problem and antenna placement is very important.
Have Sirrius, love it. I dont know how much I paid for it, but I will buy it again. ($12/Month???) I bought 2 year block should be coming up soon. Money well spent. (Keeping in mind that I am in my car for 2 hours per day.)
I subscribed after the trial expired, but I may cancel after a while; 13 bucks a month is almost worth not having to hear commercials.
But in the hilly terrain in PA, dropouts are too frequent, and has been mentioned before, the bitrate sucks.
I agree with the a-la-carte approach; I’d pay half of the $13 for 10 or 12 channels of stuff that I like (at a decent bitrate), screw the other 100 or so…
That’s what these guys ought to do – let people vote with their wallets, and dump the channels (and bandwidth) that don’t sell.
If the Yugoslavian Folk Channel goes off the air, well c’est la vie.
Edit: My MP3 player with 128kbit tunes through the Aux jack sounds noticeably better than the XM music channels.
Why pay $15 a month to listen to satellite radio when you can pop in a MP-3 CD with 250 songs on it, unless you get a charge out of a middle-aged wierdo talking dirty to over the hill, saggy former Playboy bunnies?
“Unless you have a super-high-end aftermarket system, it will be difficult to hear a sound quality difference between CD and Satellite with a typical car audio system on the music stations”
I’m afraid I have to disagree. I can hear the difference between my iPod (128kbps) and the same music from the in-dash CD changer. It’s especially apparent on symphonic music. And that’s with the factory Bose system which, in my opinion is sub-par. If I hang on to this car I’m going to replace the speakers with some that are considerably better.
the deal breaker for me was the sound quality, which was horrid….and my car has a way above average sound system and music reproduction quality is very important to me…the sound was worse than am. you don’t need a “golden ear” to hear how inferior the satellite radio music quality really is.
I’m afraid I have to disagree. I can hear the difference between my iPod (128kbps) and the same music from the in-dash CD changer. It’s especially apparent on symphonic music. And that’s with the factory Bose system which, in my opinion is sub-par.
The difference you hear is the difference in level matching between the CD Player and your iPod. If you were to properly level match the two sources you would be hard pressed to hear a difference.
“The difference you hear is the difference in level matching between the CD Player and your iPod. If you were to properly level match the two sources you would be hard pressed to hear a difference.”
That would make sense for most people. But, you see, I’m a long-time audiophile, electronics tech and speaker designer as well as musician and former recording studio owner/engineer. So, in my case, I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt.
Lousy compression sucks. Period.
I listen to mainly talk channels on XM, and the ratio of commercials to content is only expanding. And each commercial repeats an 800 number 5 or 6 times. And the per-month payment plan continues to rise.
Product goes down, cost goes up. I may quit them.
I love my Sirius. I loved it so much, I bought the stock when it was at $3 figuring I knew something that had yet to be discovered. DOH!!
I love the Sirius radio in my cars, particularly the Elvis station on Sirius, Channel 13. Looks like paying Howard Stern all those millions wasn’t such a good idea.
Howard Stern did drag over a good number of listeners from terrestrial radio when he joined satellite at Sirius ………….. just not $500,000,000 worth.
Stern would have had to drag over the entire Chinese army and their relatives to offset the $500 mill they paid him, what a ludicrous contract
I certainly hope it doesn’t go under.
In rural Nova Scotia, the terrestrial stations play two kinds of music; Country and Western.
I love my iPod, but it doesn’t introduce me to NEW music.
I’m sure now that there is now only one format, there will be a more stable base. I’m sure plenty of people have held off getting either until this merger business is settled.
If it worked indoors I’d get it. I cant put an antenna outside at work and I am not near any windows. Commercial radio absolutely sucks.
I’m waiting for this new programming package deal. When’s that comin’ out? I think Sirius has a more robust channel lineup, but I prefer O&A…
That would make sense for most people. But, you see, I’m a long-time audiophile, electronics tech and speaker designer as well as musician and former recording studio owner/engineer. So, in my case, I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt.
So then you really think you can hear a difference on your factory Bose system between the iPod and Satellite? Sorry to de-bunk you. MAYBE if you had a set of TAD studio monitors with your audiophile XLO interconnects and Krell amps. But on a Bose system with road roar? C’mon brother… The problem is most people don’t level match because they don’t know how. Blow the dust off your AudioPrecision or AudioControl SA-3055 and level match and you’ll see… You are aware that the classical channels use higher bandwidth than the talk stations too?
I let my “free” initial XM subscription expire. First, the sound quality didn’t even seem up to FM standards to my ears. The dynamic range is rather noticeably compressed, especially compared to a CD source. The “level matching” argument doesn’t pass muster with me either … and yes I’m well aware of that issue.
Second, I don’t want to listen to some generic canned music from a studio-bot a zillion miles away. Either give me local personalities or I can play my own CDs. We have a couple of local stations which are fun to listen to, and one of the things I count on is local traffic updates. Satellite radio, unlike satellite television, hasn’t addressed the localization of some content.
Finally, the last thing I need is yet one more company dipping it’s hands into my bank account every month. I suspect that I’m not the only one who is highly reluctant to sign up for yet another subscription service. The satellite radio industry has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over it’s life span and shows little promise of recovering that money. Remember the big bucks attempts to do satellite based Internet access and phones? Both were essentially flame outs because they couldn’t compete with evolving terrestrial systems. And oh yeah, cheap cash via Wall Street is very much OFF THE TABLE.
I love XM. I’ve had it for a couple of years and I’ll keep it as long as it’s available (unless the price goes way up). I actually have three radios activated – one in each car and a portable at home that I can use either here (I’m listening to Flight 26 right now) or on the go (it has a reasonable built-in antenna plus there’s a nice little clip antenna you can use when you’re out of range of repeater signal and you have to use the satellites).
We have a repeater where I live (Regina, Saskatchewan) so dropouts are very rare. In the country it works fine. I drove to Vancouver in May and I didn’t have any dropouts at all until I was well into the Rockies. Mountains do get in the way a little.
It costs but the cost is reasonable. If a person can afford to drive a car with more than four cylinders, he or she can afford satellite radio, IMHO. (I drive a stick so the $1,500 I saved will pay for 100 months of satellite radio. :) )
So then you really think you can hear a difference on your factory Bose system between the iPod and Satellite? Sorry to de-bunk you. MAYBE if you had a set of TAD studio monitors with your audiophile XLO interconnects and Krell amps.
You shouldn’t need expensive speakers to be able to tell the difference between actual cymbal sounds and the high frequency noise that compression below 192 kbps (my personal “acceptable minimum”) provides. I don’t even think you need separate tweeters to hear it. My friend is hard of hearing and often wears hearing aids, and even he complains about how bad his Sirius sounds. It truly is even worse than the lowly 128 kbps MP3. If you can’t tell the difference, that’s fine. But don’t say that I can’t. I love music, and it’s actually insulting that you would suggest that my hearing is so bad that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between XM/Sirius and a high quality CD. I’ve accepted that car stereos will always sound like crap, no matter how much effort you put into them, compared to my home system. But they can still sound “good enough” with a decent source.
Sirius is far more compressed than XM (on the music channels at least).
I agree that it is a very lossy compression, but it’s acceptable. I don’t listen to XM for the sound quality. I listen for the variety. If I hear stuff on XM that I like, I buy it on CD (not online, pre-compressed) and I make my own 192kbps rips for my iPod and iPhone (or I simply listen right off the CD – how quaint huh? :) ).
In the car the noise floor is such that the compression is not that annoying. At home I can tell that it’s compressed but I forget about it after a few minutes. After all, I’m not listening to a song on XM and then the same song on CD back-to-back.
To use the car analogy, sure, I’d rather drive a G8 or a 325i or a 911 or an R8 all the time but sometimes it’s more convenient to drive my Accord. Just because it’s not a perfect driver’s car doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy driving it. Ditto XM to music.
Can somebody explain to me what “level matching” is and how it helps?
I have had xm for years, thanks to the wife. If there was ANYWHERE else to hear all the NHL games….but there isn’t. I love to catch a few of the shows as well.
A few of the posts sound as if they expect to tune 1 station and leave it there. I suggest switching around; it satisfies the OCD urge and you can hear some new music that way.
That said, I love my local non-Clear Channel radio station. It is where I hear 95% of the new music that I buy. (insert plug for CD-101 in Columbus here)
Stern would have had to drag over the entire Chinese army and their relatives to offset the $500 mill they paid him, what a ludicrous contract
hitguy gets the winning comment in my book. I was never that sure of the business model and I don’t think that it is a winner in its current incarnation going forward.
Stern is a shining example of the promise of America: Where a juvenile jokester blabbing incessantly about boobs can make two thousand times more than the average working man.
“Fart Man” on WOR-TV in New York was his pinnacle…
In-car wireless internet with streaming internet radio will put the final nail in the coffin of Sirius-XM, if it manages to last that long. You can get streaming MP3 quality music that appeals to almost any taste for free and without commercials. With cities and towns rolling out free wireless, it will only be a matter of time.
I pay around $12 a month for basically two channels on XM – Chill 90% of the time and maybe Real Jazz for the rest. I hate commercials so much that it’s worth it. Having a wide variety of artists/songs – many of which I’ve never heard – is worth it. Can you put a price on your blood pressure and sanity in the morning not having to be subjected to talking heads and commercials? I can and did.
Yes, I have an iPod, but I simply don’t have the variety of artists/songs that I hear on Chill. Like with Rhapsody in the home (with SONOS), I hear so much new music I would otherwise never know about. It’s nice to sit back and have that variety without commercial interruption.
As for sound quality, there is a major difference between vehicle head units and their respective XM implementations. XM in the Vette was terribly compressed. Was that XM? No, it was the Vette’s horrible head unit. XM in the Odyssey/Accord? Very good. Better than FM. In the Audi? Closer to CD quality with fiber optic connections. I actually cancelled XM in the Vette because I couldn’t bear to listen to it. Just wasn’t worth it. Before blaming XM/Sirius, make sure to listen to it in another vehicle. It should sound a good deal better than FM.
“Can somebody explain to me what “level matching” is and how it helps?”
It’s well-known that when comparing two different signal sources (like when comparing two different set of speakers playing the same song), people will almost always judge the one that is loudest to be “best”. Level-matching is simply making sure that the two signals are the same volume to eliminate this effect.
I have years of experience doing critical listening both professionally and personally. I’m listening for detail, distortion, frequency peaks and dips and other non-musical artifacts. The single biggest factor in being able to do this effectively is the quality of the speakers being used. It’s amazing how easy it is to hear the artifacts of lossy compression on certain material if you have the right speakers. As music becomes more complex (more instruments, more parts, etc.) lossy compression algorithms do a poorer and poorer job of deciding what to keep and what to throw away.
My wife is a fan of the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. To my ears it sounds like crap on anything less than my main hi-fi system because there is so much stuff in it that it gets really smeared. But when played on the speakers I desgined and built it’s quite nice. You can clearly hear all the detail.
It’s true that car environments are tough for hi-fi. But the main problem (external noise) does not absolve the playback system of being able to resolve complex music faithfully. Again, the culprit is the poor quality of almost all car speakers. Considering how much automakers charge for premium sound systems, it’s really a shame how little they spend on the speakers. Most car speakers cost only a few dollars. And they sound like it.
I have Sirius and love commercial free music. The sound quality sounds excellent to my ears. Worth every penny.
I have to agree on the poor sound ‘kwalitee’ on Sirius music stations. I received the free 6 months subscription on my 07 Fusion and the poor sound was the reason why I didn’t pop the $12/mo to continue. I’m not an audiophile by any means, but there just wasn’t the dynamic range I expect from the Sirius signal. I load up my MP3 with a gabazillion songs instead and play it through the aux input.
I’ve had XM for 4 years and I only tune in to terrestrial radio when I want the local news. XM gives me a greater variety of music (real jazz, new age, Chill, too bad they dropped the house music) and talk (Air America, Randi Rhodes, Ed Schultz) that I can’t get in my podunk little town. It’s really useful when I drive out of town, where only country music can be heard. And there are no surprises in my music collection.
Like another said, it’s worth every penny.
I have had both Sirius and XM. The sound quality for music, as mentioned, is so-so. Has a sort of hollow echo effect. But I love it for the choice of talk and comedy channels. Especially for drives in the western states; there is no terrestrial radio outside of large cities. It’s worth $10-15/mo. to me.
As for sound quality, there is a major difference between vehicle head units and their respective XM implementations. XM in the Vette was terribly compressed. Was that XM? No, it was the Vette’s horrible head unit. XM in the Odyssey/Accord? Very good. Better than FM. In the Audi? Closer to CD quality with fiber optic connections. I actually cancelled XM in the Vette because I couldn’t bear to listen to it. Just wasn’t worth it. Before blaming XM/Sirius, make sure to listen to it in another vehicle. It should sound a good deal better than FM.
Interesting. I came back to this thread because I started thinking about exactly what you’re saying; maybe the receiver is responsible for the terrible sound quality that I’ve experienced? My friend has had XM through an Alpine deck, and two different Sirius receivers. They all sounded terrible (we do a lot of road trips together), but I suppose it is possible they were all just terrible receivers. Maybe the D/A converters just aren’t very good.
It’s true that car environments are tough for hi-fi. But the main problem (external noise) does not absolve the playback system of being able to resolve complex music faithfully.
I always thought the main problem with the car environment is that it’s a small area with hard plastic and glass surfaces. Combine that with the horrible enclosures (doors and dash; the trunk is actually a decent enclosure), and it’s an acoustic nightmare! I spent much of my youth drowning it out with a ridiculously loud sub. But yeah, I agree that the car manufacturers should spend the extra couple bucks to put decent speakers in. It seems absurd that you have to rip apart the interior of a brand new car just to make the stereo worth listening to. Also, would it really cost much more to put in at least 18 gauge speaker wire while they’re at it?
Although the audiophiles will never agree with me until they have heard the A-B-X tests I have, you would be hard pressed to hear a difference between a CD in the player mechanism, and one being played at Sirius or XM headquaters, through the compressed through the computer, beamed down through the Hughes or Sirius 1 satellite, and then into your car IF there are no other factors adding audio ‘funk’ into the equation. The problem is most head units and car audio systems introduce signal equalization to the mix.
On the Corvette make sure that the ambient volume dependent compression circuits are off. If you want clean, pure, unadulterated audio, there are some awesome new aftermarket products that can eliminate the Corvette/Bose(or any other car manufacturer)amplification, crossovers, and signal processing circuits- check out JL Audio’s CleanSweep or AudioControl’s DQL-8.
Finally, although the speakers from the factory in the car usually aren’t the greatest, speaker placement is the main difference between a good sounding car audio system and a poor one. A car is a terrible place to listen to music because of comb filtering and reflections, however, a set of mediocre speaker in a good location (to minimize path-length differences to preserve stereo) will outperform great speakers in a poor location. And although 18 gauge or better would be nice for a subwoofer, automakers will always use the skinny stuff to keep weight down. Have no fear, 22-gauge is all you need in a car for a ‘normal’ system (uh-oh, I hear the audiophiles getting ready to attack).
And although 18 gauge or better would be nice for a subwoofer, automakers will always use the skinny stuff to keep weight down. Have no fear, 22-gauge is all you need in a car for a ‘normal’ system (uh-oh, I hear the audiophiles getting ready to attack).
I actually won’t disagree with you on that. I wasn’t about to bother running new speaker wire to the doors of my Mazda3 when I did the stereo on that, and the 22 gauge wire certainly hasn’t hurt anything. My 5X7s don’t play very low and the relatively poor sound has nothing to do with bass; it’s all mid-range coloration from the doors. But, I do believe that upgrading to 16 gauge on 6X9s in the back deck has improved the tightness of the bass on previous systems I’ve had. Those speakers actually do play low enough for damping factor to be a, uh, factor, and if you calculate the DF for a long run like that on small wire you probably end up with a DF well under 5. Whether it’s just my mind playing tricks on me or not, it isn’t difficult to run some decent wire to the back deck anyway.
And yes, I’m not enough of an audiophile to think that oval speakers are never the best option in certain spaces for automotive applications!