xm vs sirius

I bought Sirius right before my wife and I drove on a 5-week trip out west earlier this year. I found the quality to be *satisfactory*, sort of MP3-ish, and the only time it cut out in almost 10,000 miles was when we went through tunnels, or very long underpasses. We played it almost continuously!
Jeff O.
Hobe Sound, FL

 

I want to buy a Factory Sirius Kit for my 2006 Prius. Who has the best price and where do I get it?

 

I look at it his way - Since Howard's deal was announced, Sirius membership has increased from 600K subscibers to just over 2 million. At $12.95/mo, even if you assume NONE of those 1.4M new members were due to Howard's impending arrival ($217.5M annual income), look at his current following...

He has 12 million listeners. Assume that only 1/10th of them get Sirius in January to follow him. 1.2M subscribers at $12.95/mo will make Sirius $186.5M in 2006.

Add 'em up. 217.5M since he signed on, and potentially another 186.5M this year... 404M in additional profits, and they're paying him 100M a year? Good deal for Sirius - from 93.25M before Howard to potentially 500M after Howard - take away his salary, and their profits have quadrupled, based off of a single channel/show.

Ahhh, to dream.....

 

Yeah, except you're forgetting that Sirius loses $150 on each subscriber... not sure where that money goes, but I definitely read that somewhere.

 

The only "factory" kit available is this one from Factory Interactive. As I understand it, they use the Sirius tuner made for the Solara, but it also works with the Prius display. Others have posted that it limits artist/title text to something like 10 characters on each line. However, you get full functionality with the MFD and steering wheel controls.

 

Because of this thread, I think the original poster was referring to reception from the FM transmitter, not the satellites. But since we're on the subject, I can offer a suggestion to anyone getting signal drop-out with Sirius.

If your antenna is placed on the slope of the roof, such as near the terrestrial antenna, then you will start off with less reception. Horizontal placement will give you the best signal. Also, placement on the driver's side improves reception if you have to drive under a canopy of trees, where the only opening to the sky is the center of the road.

Here's where I placed my antenna, which is an ultra-low profile (dot). This is looking at the driver's side of my car (the terrestrial antenna is in the pic for reference). The wire runs under the black rubber strip along the roof of the car, then through the hatch. The strip is easy to remove and replace, and I suspect Toyota designed it with this in mind. When I have time, I'll take some pics of my wire run -- I never had to remove any panels, and it's almost completely hidden.

 

I have the SIRIUS Starmate Replay and it doesn't cut out unless i am stationary under an overpass. Even then ...most of the time it is okay. I am using all the stock gear that came with the car kit. I am not using the FM broadcast as that was really a messs. I just run a cable into the aux. It works great.

 

XM reception and sound quality is just GOOD. It sounds very similar to a standard FM radio station. That means that it could be better.

I do ocassionally lose signals if i'm underground in a heavy concrete parking lot though. Same deal with normal radio.

XM is like cable. Lots of channels but you will only use a few.

 

I installed the Sirius kit that integrates with the MFD from Metroptn and it sounds great. I haven't had any problems with it at all. The music sounds great and Stern sounded just as good as regular radio this morning. Yeah the 10 character limit blows, but whenever they come out with a hack for it it should be fine...or whenever they come out with the correct Prius receiver. It took about 2 hours to install....I just removed the 2 right vents and slid my hand to the back of the stereo to connect, don't waste your time taking the whole dashboard apart.