Xm radio- activated!

Sirius-XM radio has a promotion and is broadcasting in open channel 'til Sept 8

 

dang!

 

Yeah, I noticed the annoying weather alerts started popping up a week or two back and found all the stations activated again.
Haven't used it since.

PS- one thing I did notice when going through the stations- they pretty much sounded overly mp3 compressed or bit-starved. Very poor quality overall. If I was paying for it I would complain....

 

Same thing happened to me the other day. I was using one of our older fleet vehicles and I was surprised to hear channels working on the Sirius-XM radio. Since it's never been our company policy to renew satellite radio contracts once they expire, this was a mystery,
...until now.

 

How was the sound quality?
Did you consider it overly compressed?

 

The sound didn't seem like anything special, but I did notice that the full lineup of channels wasn't there.

 

I was wondering when they would do another one of those promotions. I have a trip to Vegas planned for this weekend, so that will come in handy. Although I'm not sure I'll take my PiP. Yes, it gets significantly better gas mileage than everyone else's cars/trucks, but I don't want to deal with my friends complaining about me not going 90 the entire trip, and I don't want to pull my Fuelly numbers down haha.

 

This is now 2-3 times this year? that they have given the free channels for a few weeks or a month. Not enough folks buy the service, and the company stock drops every week. Sadly they may go away entirely if not enough use it.
If I drove long trips every day, the service might have some value to me, but as it is, not worth a penny a year to me.

 

I wouldn't really care if it goes away entirely. I would pay for it at their $5/month pricing discount for 5/6 months, but from so many reviews of them continuing to charge after cancelling and putting the full bill on peoples' credit cards, I'd rather not give them my credit card information anyways. I had to tell them like 5 times to stop calling me in the first place.

 

Sirius/XM has bar none the worst sound of any source I've ever listened to. I'd rather listen to a clear AM station than their sound. At least AM's deficiencies are nowhere near as grating as the digital artifacts present in satellite radio.

 

I'm paying for two subscriptions, but honestly, I don't use them very much. If they went away, it wouldn't have much impact on me.

 

I'm paying for two subscriptions, but honestly, I don't use them very much. If they went away, it wouldn't have much impact on me.

On the other hand, there are times when it's the best thing available. When I'm in the mountains or way up north, it's the closest thing to a link to civilization sometimes. I'm sure a lot of truckers would miss it also.

 

The advantages to SiriusXM have gotten diminished over the years with internet radio becoming so mainstream. And for those places with low reception, an ipod or music stored on your phone is usually enough.

 

Thanks for replying- at least I know it wasn't just me!
It's funny you mention AM radio- because that's what I was listening to before and after the XM sampling... and the AM broadcast did actually sound quite a bit better than the compressed crap XM was pushing out.
Quite a few years ago- I did subscribe to XM and wasn't that bad. I guess they finally reached thelimits the the sat transponder data output so when they added new channels they just cut down the bitrate of existing channels to squeeze in more new channels at a lower overall bitrate per channel.

 

I do not know about that. AM's artifacts (hum, fade, static) are pretty bad. That's why it's called "Ancient Mary" by old time ham operators.

 

Noticed the same thing. Even the mp3's on my flash drive sounded better than the satellite stations. It's a nice backup feature, but overpriced with too many fees and taxes.

 

So what's killing satellite radio? Internet radio, local radio, digital storage of podcasts/music?

A combination of all perhaps?

 

No loss as far as I am concerned, too much talk for pay radio.