My wife and son had cars that came with 6 months free, but I don’t think they used it or paid to keep it, and I’ve never listened to it. But I have always heard that the quality was poor and the reason to get it was no commercials, nationwide coverage, and channels dedicated to one kind of music or talk. Personally I like to get out of my bubble sometimes for the chance to hear a song or artist or genre I never heard of. Still difficult since almost all FM stations are owned by big corporations and rotate the same limited list of songs and would never have an actual DJ who would pull out some obscure song and play it just because he felt like it. (No Dr. Johnny Fevers or Venus Flytraps anymore.)
Bottom line though, through the years I have always heard people say both Sirius and XM quality was sub FM. If this article is correct and the average bitrate is 32 kbps, that would be voice quality, not music quality, MP3 would be 160 or 320 kbps. http://www.carstereochick.com/2015/04/25/why-siriusxm-sucks-what-to-know-before-you-buy-subscribe/ I saw another article that said the bitrate can vary by channel, but that the more channels they broadcast over the satellites, the less bandwidth they can devote to each channel, and they feel the key to increasing revenue is more channels, not better sound quality. I also saw that they use some kind of perceptual or neural encoding to get the bitrate down, and that leads to artifacts and a “swirly” sound, whatever that means. FWIW, this article claims that you can use your subscription to stream over the Internet, if you’re willing to take the hit on your mobile data plan, and the quality will be better. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/make-your-cars-satellite-radio-sound-better/ Both articles also say that sat radio will sound better in some cars because the hardware has post-processing after the tuner to recreate some of the sound quality that was lost in encoding. I guess that’s kind of like the TV sets that take 1080p 30fps input and fill in the missing information to drive a 2160p 60fps panel. Or colorizing a B&W movie. The problem seems to be mostly that sat radio has a whole legacy base of installed satellites and car radios that are not upgradable via firmware, so while audio encoding has improved, the whole sat radio industry is locked into old technology because you can’t tell all those people their car radios have to be replaced, even if you were able to launch new satellites or reprogram the existing ones. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Chuck McCown Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 8:34 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: XM Radio Depends on the channel. Truckers seem to like it. Me, I am too cheap. FM is free and NPR doesn’t have too many commercial breaks. I have three presets: NPR, classic rock, contemporary c&w Sent from my iPhone On Dec 27, 2018, at 7:11 AM, Adair Winter <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: because no commercials and the same stations everywhere it pretty cool. On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 8:00 AM Matt Hoppes <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: We just got a new vehicle at work that includes XM radio for some period of time for free. Anyone else who’s had experience with XM: does it always sound like it’s compressed, digital and low fidelity? Why would anyone pay a subscription for this when I get high-fidelity FM free? -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- Adair Winter VP, Network Operations / Co-Owner Amarillo Wireless | 806.316.5071 C: 806.231.7180 <http://www.amarillowireless.net/> http://www.amarillowireless.net <http://www.amarillowireless.net> -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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