Sound Quality

One of the burning issues that I constantly see in satellite radio forums are those aimed at the sound quality of SiriusXM. Many people remember what it was like to have two companies competing for their satellite radio business and thus both companies put 100's of millions of dollars worth of resources competing for the same customer. Although it could be equally debated that all of that one-upping by both Sirius and XM is what lead to the merger of 2008.

No matter how you slice it if you ask anybody who had Sirius or XM, but mostly XM customers, the pre-merger days were much better for a variety of reasons. Normally though the same grievances are written about time and again by devotees of the services. 1) Tight playlists, 2) Reduction in the number of music channels and 3) Sound quality. Now this list could go in any order of what people think is wrong with SiriusXM although I've chosen to write about sound quality today.

A great majority of the millions of SiriusXM subscribers just listen to the service without caring what it sounds like for the most part, except when they compared it a C.D. or FM radio. At best SiriusXM to me sounds like AM radio that has too much bass when I would prefer for it to have more treble so that I could hear the lyrics of songs much clearer.

XM advertised that they had near C.D. quality sound in the early years although that is hard to believe. Having been a XM or Sirius subscriber since 2006  I don't know how people can remember what XM used to sound like before the merger of both Sirius and XM channel lineup happened almost 6 years ago, on November 12, 2008. Of course people have recordings of XM programming although I think everything sounds different once its uploaded to the internet and then I listen to on my computer.

Sure, I believe that XM did sound clearer than SiriusXM sounds today, but comparing the two service in 2008 is a lot different than in 2014.

In my own tests, completely non-scientific  I've found SiriusXM to sound better through a Sirius receiver than through an XM receiver that is built-in to my 2009 Chevy Cobalt. I have two lifetime subscriptions, 1 on a Starmate 4 and the other on a Starmate 5. I've hooked them up through the car dock and run the audio through the aux port on my factory stereo.

The built-in XM receiver sounds much smaller at the same volume as either of the Starmates. Sounds quality to me isn't a make-it or break-it feature on satellite radio for me, so I chose to take the car dock out of my Cobalt and instead use the built-in radio because I don't like wires running all over my dashboard when I can just use the receiver that I purchased with the car. In this test I used the Jazz equalization pre-set on the stereo.

In comparison on the very same pre-set did FM radio sound clear and much brighter than either of the pay services.

Recently I owned a Pioneer Inno and turned it on doing the free two week promo the company ran over Labor Day. In addition to the receiver I used the Inno's antenna headphones so that the signal would be as good as it gets.  Even with the best signal and using an XM receiver the service still sounded like it was underwater. Or a very bassy AM radio station.

Overall, I think XM people are romantic for another time in satellite radio history. When the services were pure. A time when none of their money had to go to Howard Stern, the channel line-up made more sense and it had personality. As a regular guy who listens there is no way of knowing just how bad the audio quality has gotten over the past six years. I know a lot of other things have changed and will continue to change because that is just the nature of the media business.