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Sound Quality
Ever since the channel upgrades, the sound quality has dropped. It just sounds like the data is being compressed down a bit too far in favor of reducing bandwidth over quality. The talk stations sound ok (Fox News, Radio Classics), but most often I'm listening to 66 Watercolors, and it's starting to drive me nuts. I though after the channel change maybe they needed to reset the compression on each station and it would get fixed over time. So far, it has not improved, and it started immediately after the channel change. I've been with Sirius prior to the public release and this happened once before on a much older radio that I had, and that's where I was told it was a compression issue, and it was corrected after a period of time.
This is happening on both my home system using a Sportster and also with my factory radio in my Nissan Pathfinder. Is anyone else having this problem? Any suggestions? .
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I have always thought the sound quality of the music stations was over compressed even before the channel upgrades (I havent noticed a difference since the upgrades). It just is and it always has been over compressed.
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I'll agree that it was over compressed before, but now it's worse, even listening to the DJ on Watercolors now as he was talking is somewhat . . . garbled, not clear, and it was not this bad before. Actually as I listen to it right now, it sounds good for a bit, then for a few seconds the quality drops and then clears up again. But that my actually be due to the music itself and the spectrum may be a bit wider at that point in time. If definitely didn't exist like that before. Do you know if when they made the channel change if it actually updated any of the codec's?
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I dont know about any technology updates (I wish) but, from what I understand, they were running at full channel capacity so, if there are more channels on the dial now than there were before the update, they must be compressing them even more.
I have also heard through the grapevine that they change the compression rates based on popularity. The more popular the channel, the better the sound quality.
Their whole sound quality issue is sad and archaic.
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And it's skipping/cutting out. There's a thread for it under the Online Radio section, but it's happening in the car too. It's only on some stations (mostly the ones that changed stations, from what I can tell), and it's so bad we can't listen to it.
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Sound Quality
That's funny- I was just telling my wife today that I was listening to XM in the car, 'cause it's free right now, that the sound quality was noticeably better than what we get in the house, boat, or trailer on Sirius. What is up with that?!?
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I traded in a car with an XM Commander add-on that sounded fine; the new car (Audi S4) has a Sirius head unit. I was shocked by the awful sound of Sirius channel 67 (Real Jazz) -- sounds like a cassette deck with a bad motor! As noted, other channels (such as channel 4) are not nearly so bad. Will be looking for an XM head unit to swap in. This is pathetic.
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I bought an Alpine CDE-124SXM car radio that came with a SXV100 Sirius tuner. I was under the impression that sound quality of the xm was near CD quality. Sure does not seem to be. Closer to AM radio to me. I also saw some reviews on Sirius tuner units that seemed to favor some over others on sound quality. Is this real or are some people just too hard to pelase? Is the quality dependant upon station or signal strength or what?
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The quality is dependent on channel and not on signal strength. Some of the more popular channels have a higher quality sound but, nothing near CD quality.
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Sound Quality
I started this thread back in May '11, and quality just has not improved over the last several months at all. At the beginning of December, my old Sportster died with the constant Acquiring Signal failure. So I purchased a new StarMate 8 unit. Like the Sportster, it spends 99% of the year in the house. The StarMate 8 does not sound any better. Matter of fact, I found sky.fm radio on the internet today that uses a 40K stream for it's free listening service. I am amazed at how much better that the free SmoothJazz 40K stream is compared to the stream currently in use by Sirius. It's good enough, that I may consider dropping my second subscription for in the house. I wish the folks at Sirius would realize that "Close to Good is NOT Good Enough".
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I just had my Sirius StarMate 8 installed a couple of days ago. The radio was a Christmas gift from my wife to help with my daily two hour commute. It only took a few minutes for me to notice how bad the sound quality was when compared to any decent stereo FM radio station in my broadcast area. I also listened to NPR and compared it to the Sirius NPR channel, which was broadcasting the same content at the same time. It was night and day. The Sirius sound featured reduced bandwidth, digital artifacts similar to low quality mp3s, and even made talk stations difficult to listen to. In the digital world, this is just ridiculous. I'm extremely disappointed. As a professional musician and audio producer, I don't see how I'll be able to stand this after my initial subscription period runs out.
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I read a lot on the Forums about the bad audio quality on Siriusxm. I just bought a Buick Enclave and it has a trial xm. I find the sound is very good. This Buick has a nice sound system and everything sounds good. Possibly, this system can handle the compression better than some.
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My new to me 2011 Ford Taurus SHO's Sirius stations sound pretty good to me also. Of course, it might me be that my 64 year old ears don't function as well also. :)
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Much as I like Sirius' programming the sound quality could be alot better. I've been a subscriber for about 10yrs and have seen it go down hill in the past several years. At first I thought it was because my old Starmate Replay crapped out and that my new Starmate was worse. In fact the the FM signal on it was much worse and thankfully my new car had an aux plug. The car also came with a free XM trial and what I found was that if I flipped back and forth between the Starmate and the car that the sound quality was significantly better through the car. I can live with that but what I've noticed alot is that the sound is kind of warbely for lack of a better description. It sort of reminds me of when I used to have a sensitive turntable and if you walked past it with a heavy foot it would would flutter the sound. It's most noticeable during very quiet musical passages like soft piano playing. Probably something to do with compression or whatever but it really sucks!
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I have a car with an excellent sound system and was, frankly, surprised by how bad SiriusXM radio sounds. From best to worst in the car I would say: DVD-Audio (sadly there's a very limited selection because this really does sound good), CD Audio, 320 bit MP3, 192 bit MP3, FM, SiriusXM. This is *EXTREMELY* disappointing since I really like the musical variety more than Pandora since I like so many different types of music. If anything, satellite radio should *at least* sound as good as an iPod.
I'm going to stay a subscriber for now because I jog/run a lot and the iPhone app sounds halfway decent through small Bose in-ear headphones and I like being surprised by what song comes up next, but I really wish they would *at least* improve their Internet streams to 256kbps (or 320 ideally, but nobody does that) so that it sounds as good as iTunes on a semi-decent computer system. Using the SoundBlaster Control panel can help a lot since I an add special effects and the music is processed at 96 instead of 44, but there's only so much that can be done.
Come on SiriusXM, give us the option to change sound quality for Internet streaming. I realize there might not be a lot you can do for car radios since the technology is already kind of old.
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P.S.: does anyone know the bit rate that SiriusXM is actually using?
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The internet stream use to be 64kb only a couple of years ago. It was only recently that they "upgraded" to 128k.
As far as internet feed goes, it is variable depending on the station. More popular channels have better quality audio. They do this because their spectrum is limited. I'd rather see them cut some dead weight and up the more popular channels ever more.
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Well I finally dumped my last Sirius subscription, and changed to Sky.fm As I think I mentioned a while back, I had a Nissan factory radio that a Sirius exec brought back for me, and a Starmate 8. The quality on both was bad in my opinion.
Recently, I did some testing using my old Blackberry Bold (not exactly a high quality audio device) into a cassette adapter and used the free sky.fm app set to use the AAC-HE 40kbps streams. These 40k streams definitely sound better than Sirius! So whatever Sirius is using for a data rate/ compression is lower than that. And under sky.fm's free account, you can set the rate up to 96K. If you get a paid subscription (which costs less than Sirius) you have the options to go up to 256K. At that speed the sound is amazingly great, even with the crappy way I connected it.
This clearly isn't for everyone as the channels are music only, and would require a decent data plan with their phone carrier, and good data coverage. I have an unlimited data plan, and when the weather warms up, I'll make a connection directly into the car radio or just use an fm transmitter.
It's just sad that CD Radio which became Sirius was to have high quality CD like sound, and doesn't even come close to providing what they started with. I had Sirius before the radios were publicly out I never thought there would be a day that I would close my account.