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Thursday, January 05, 2006

Sirius Sound Quality Review

I purchased a Sirius Starmate Replay over the Holidays and I must say that while I am impressed with the quality of the programming, the sound quality is pretty bad. I would equate it to listening to a 64Kbps MP3 stream, not a MP3Pro or MWA stream, but plain old MP3 at 64Kbps, maybe 96Kbps. The high end is very muddy with quite a bit of artifacts in the encoding. Cymbals are the most affected. I really hope that Sirius will address this in the near future. My friend got an XM radio over Christmas and when he comes to my place we'll hook it up to my Stereo for a comparison. But a word to the wise, if you are expecting CD Quality, don't expect it from Sirius, near-CD quality? Nope, I'd say more like near 64/96Kbps MP3 quality. I honestly think that there are FM radio station on my Audi Bose system that sound better than Sirius running through my Audi OR my home stereo. It really is dissapointing.

If you can't tell the differece between 96Kbps MP3 and 128Kbps MP3 it may suit you. I give it a 3 out of 5 stars with the complaing being sound quality.

posted by Eric at 1:51 PM

2 Comments:

  • Eric,

    I recently purchased a Kenwood ez900hds HD FM/cd-radio to replace my factory installed car radio. I wanted to take advantage of HD FM, but had to subscribe to Sirius first in order to activate the other features in the Kenwood. I figured that I would check out satellite radio.

    I am the kind of person to whom quality of sound is more important than content. Wow was I disappointed in the Sirius service. It was like listening to a bad cassette tape on the music channels and to a low band width internet stream on the talk channels. Since the sound quality of all the other services was so good, I thought that this might be a settings problem with my Kenwood. Sirius gave me an explanation that was kind of a dump of responsibility. They claimed that this was because the Kenwood mishandles sirius' "system multiplexing scheme".

    It is hard for me to believe that this is a tuner problem, but I thought that this may compliment what you posted.

    Marc

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4/01/2006 5:35 PM  

  • Just thought I would chime in. I never had much interest in satellite radio until I drove a rental car with XM. I was impressed with the channel selection and I recall that sound quality and reception was substantially better than standard FM channels.

    So when I purchased a new Audi A4 I paid extra for the factory installed satellite radio. My car had Sirius, and I didn't think it would be that different from XM.

    Now perhaps I am remembering XM to be better than it really was, but what I can say with certainty is that Sirius in my Audi sounds absolutely terrible. While quality varies depending on the channel, many of the music channels are filled with compression artifacts common to poor, streaming Internet audio. I even contacted Sirius to find out if perhaps something was configured incorrectly with my receiver, but received no help.

    I have since canceled my service. Standard FM and even 128kbps MP3s sound way better than Sirius.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7/14/2007 11:12 PM  

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