I have had Sirius for a while in my S and a home unit. Both are hard-wired to their respective receivers, not the fm transceiver BS. In either listening situation there is background noise so I have never really "heard" what is sounds like, I have an old pair of really nice Sony reference headphones that bring out every detail (and every flaw) and a Nice Yamaha receiver. So for whatever reason I turned on Sirius and it sounded like hell....very digital if that makes sense. I know Sirius is beamed to us digitally but I thought it was "cd quality"

 

Not even close to CD quality. They have so many channels and so little bandwidth to work with that they have to do a crazy amount of compression. I like sirius despite the poor sound quality. I usually use it as background music at work (I have a dock at my desk) and in the car where the poor sound quality isn't as apparent. I like it more for the content than the sound quality for sure. Any time I switch to my ipod in my car I'm reminded how bad sirius is compared to a well encoded mp3.

 

I agree, but I still listen to sirius more then anything else

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Same sentiment here. If they didn't have Stern, I would drop it.

 

Why not just stream it over the interweb? Forget the dock and moving the head unit.

 

A friend of mine has one of those Serius receivers you get at Best Buy. I don't recall the brand. It has that same overly-compressed digital quaity. He says he's heard that some other receivers, like the ones built in to cars, typically do a better job a digital-analog conversion and sound much better. <shrug> I dunno, there's only so much signal there, but maybe they have some DSP algorithms that help eliminate the compression artifacts in a way that you can't hear.

 

I'm not aware of any radios being better at decoding the signal. It is what it is. The main advantage that built-in radios would have over most people's stand alone receivers is that it's wired directly into the system. Most people use the FM Transmitter to listen in their car, which makes it sound even worse, especially in a city like Dallas where it's almost impossible to find unused frequencies. I have mine hard-wired in both of my cars and it sounds a lot better than it does when going through FM.