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Audio Quality of Sirius

The low sound quality of Sirius/XM forced me drop the service a while ago. What finally convinced me was when listening to a local AM station on my home rig and listening to some music. Yes the music had the slight AM interference from a tuner that was really built for FM, but that station sounded more pleasing than the low sampled music artifacts on Sirus/XM. I couldn't believe it but the digital artifacts I heard on Sat actually sounded worse than a local AM radio station to me. In 2012, now 2013, there is no excuse in consumers having to put up with such low quality and be asked to pay for it as well. With that, I dropped Sat and have never looked back except hoping to read where the sound quality is improving. I now stream whenever I have the urge and find I get into the music much more than I ever could with Sirus/XM. I had noticed I could only listen to a couple of songs at a time before I felt the need to change it and am convinced it was because of the digital compressed noise that they are pushing out to us. Just my 2 cents.
 
Weighed the issue, and finally decided to drop my subscription to Sirius. I was mainly only listening to Studio 54 and 60's on 6. And since the debut of Studio 54, they have overly researched the songs played, and cut back on all of the deep cuts. They screwed up the programming on that channel. 60's on 6 I can find many other places on the internet to get my fix. But it really boils down to the degraded audio quality of webstream channels. If that hadn't recently taken place, my subscription would still exist. At this point, I doubt I'll ever look/go back.
 
Brian Bowers said:
But it really boils down to the degraded audio quality of webstream channels. If that hadn't recently taken place, my subscription would still exist. At this point, I doubt I'll ever look/go back.
Click to expand...
Were you listening on a PC or the SXM app?
 
PC with Echo MIA card, using the balanced outs (capable of S/N of -95 dB). Honestly, Sirius' webstreams used to sound pretty darn nice (decent processing and bandwidth), but they recently did something, and now they sound nothing like CD quality. Yuk. They can have it. I'm finding I can find all of the streams I need (w/ decent programming, processing and bandwidth), free of charge, on the internet. I don't need Stern anymore either.
 
Brian, I've tried to find somebody who actually resembles and engineer at SXM to talk about their audio processing - they've got to do something as you mentioned, even the online is cruddy, while the over the air Sirius is so damn swirly I get seasick with the "wow & flutter" effects. At least when it was just XM, they had engineers who would actually reply to your email comments about their processing and encoding, way back when they WERE CD -quality. Online SXM was decent for a while too - maybe they should offer two versions of that - a decent online and their crappier app version?
 
I do agree if you go with anything, get XM 2.0. it'll be better than any serius receiver.
My dad has pretty good hearing and not only with him but with other people, I had to point out the audio qualety for them to say "Oh yeah, you're right. Fm does sound better."
truth is that S/XM has nitch formats (not found on local Am/FM broadcasting)so i guess most dont give a damn about crapppy audio qualety .
 
When I listened to SXM's online stream about a year ago I thought it sounded decent. Better than Pandora free at least. Has it gotten worse since then?
 
I got Sirius back in 2005 because I thought XM's sound quality was crap (to note that Sirius wasn't that great either with rolled off highs but better). I can't imagine what XM sounds like. I hope it wasn't as bad as the XM service I listened to on the airplane. That was a mess. The SBR section of the codec kept cutting out during busy music passages, especially rock music. All the time, very grungy.

My dad got a Chrysler Sebring convertible recently with Sirius on-board. Yuck and double yuck. That radio adds a lot more of the stereo difference signal into the mix which amplifies the codec's artifacts/errors. The AM section of the radio, which only passes 6kc of audio, sounds better. Too bad the Boston Acoustics sound system can't take advantage of a good source. Well, except perhaps a well mastered CD.
 
You're right about that Chrysler / Dodge factory radio - the AM is actually half way decent and sounds BETTER than the crappy Sirius as they did add too much stereo difference signal and that amplifies the swirly codec artifacts.
I am going to try an old XM in the car - it has to be at least as good as the AM so I can get my American Top 40 fix every weekend from SXM 7.
 
I just replaced my Sirius Starmate 5 with a new SiriusXM Edge and the improvement in sound quality is incredible. Granted, I am comparing my 5 year old radio with something brand new, but based on what everyone is saying the XM 2.0 platform is definitely much more listenable than Sirius. I should have switched a long time ago.
 
I just replaced 2 sirius radios with XM Express models, and the improvement is sound is great. no swirly sound. on sirius channel 32 the bridge is unlistenable. it sounds great on XM. glad I made the switch.
 
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