Yes my Sirius is clear! But dynamically its-blah..... my copied CDs blow it out of the water, as does my mp3 player! I was expecting much more! Is it me? I spent $100 for the hook-up. And of course the the subscript, Im going to cancel, as of now, tell me Im nuts!

 

YES I totally agree; I have XM and any cd I play is much clearer... some people can't tell the difference but I swear the bitrate on satellite is LOWER than 128 kbps.

 

Yeah, sound quality sucks on satellite. The bandwidth they have to work with is too small so the compress the hell out of the stations. I like the content enough to deal with it though.

 

according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_Satellite_Radio)
XM has bitrates between 4-64kbs. I wouldn't expect Sirius to be much
different. I've seen estimates that your average music channel on both
is roughly 32kbs, or roughly 1/4 the rate of your average not very high
quality MP3.
I have XM in my other car - regular FM radio has better sound quality.

 

Dont get me wrong Sirius is very clear and I havnt dropped a sig. yet! Its the sound, its inferior to a good FM station. Sounds more like a super clean mono AM station!

 

Yes, it sucks. I have been a follower of the technology for over a decade... Sirius was formerly known as "CD Radio".

The compression algorithm they use is highly advanced licensed technology which makes the the MP3 compression technology look like a high school science project in comparison. The trouble is that they are constrained by limited bandwidth and offer so much varying content that the fidelity is extremely comprimised. They made a strategic decision that more content would aquire more subscribers than less content with higher quality. As an audiophile, it is barely tolerable at times.

Sirius' compression algorithm allows for it to vary the compression level on a channel basis. So, the more main stream music channels sound better than the more focused channels (such as the Elvis channel). Also you will notice the "talk" channels sound very tinny. It would create quite an uproar if they announced one day they would have 50 channels instead of 100 to improve quality - the more is better mentaility is hard to change.

Still, I like Sirius for the exposure to differnt music that you cannot get these days on the free airwaves dominated by Clear Channel. Also, you can keep up with television broadcasts on the commute home. But after a while, my ears need a break and I pop in a CD or MP3.