Sound Quality

[beautyfish]

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.

[OlManRivah]

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.

[sixtn39]

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.

[deckm56]

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!

[sfguy]

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.

[sfguy]

P.S.: does anyone know the bit rate that SiriusXM is actually using?

[SiriusBuzz]

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.