DavidEduardo said:
Thanks for the answer.
I went exploring "south" of the traffic channels and discovered my 2011 era radio get the Spanish language tier, around Channel 140 or so. I listened a bit, and the music channels seem more compressed than the other channels, and the talk channels like Radio Fórmula are very "artifacty" sounding.
So, I am guessing that the Piolín Channel will be somewhere in that vicinity.
In the last channel shakeup, all of the Sirius exclusive channels (CBC et al) moved to the XM platform and vice versa and stuck in the 100s, but they were done at such a low bitrate that they're almost unlistenable. Some of the Canadian music channels are being run with the same lousy codec. It's getting complaints from the Canadians.
This may improve later this month, as all of the Clear Channel music channels except for Z100 and KIIS will exit following Clear Channel selling off their stock. Those were all at the original 2001 bitrate and all sounded quite good. Once those go away, that's bandwidth that they can reallocate to other channels to improve the quality and they will have space for a decent Piolin channel. Or they can keep shrinking the bitrates and just put on new channels. Time will tell.
The Xtra Channels (SiriusXM 2.0) are in the 500's. The Latin channels in that group are Aguilla, Latidos, Rumbon, La Kueva, Caricia, Luna, Flow Nacion, La Mezcla, Viva, Radio Formula, and Deportes en Vivo. (The web page also lists Playboy en espanol, but I'm not sure if that's current as the Playboy licensing deal was up in May.) Some of those channels are also in the 140-150 range, but I would presume that the 2.0 radios can get them in the 500's with better fidelity. I would be pissed if I paid money to hear my favorite channels running through the traffic and weather channel codec.
The sound quality on most every channel these days is degraded as they've jammed more channels into the service, but nothing says "we don't care about you" quite like playing music through a codec that barely passes voice.