We are most of the way through our 3 month trial and have been hugely un-impressed. The audio quality is horrible when using XM. It reminds of me a 64 or 96 Kbps MP3 from Napster more than a decade ago. You can really tell a difference between other inputs (say, a USB flash drive with high quality files) and XM. I'm not necessarily expecting the most superb quality, but jeez, this is just plain BAD! My wife went in for our 5,000 mile maintenance and when she asked, they told her that it was because we were too far away from Jacksonville, FL. I'm assuming they were referring to terrestrial repeaters, which from what I read, we are WAY out of range of and would have no impact on my signal over 3 hours away. Is this at all normal? Anyone else notice this problem? Thanks!
We also had a trial of XM (not on our Prius C but on our Ford Flex) and were unimpressed as well with the quality of the sound.
Maybe because we're further north, and the signal is coming on more of a slant, in the year we had XM I started thinking of it as the "sing along" service: every highrise, tree, whatever, the sound would drop out, and it was fill-in-the-blanks by singing along time. Much to frequently. I'd had to change credit card numbers sometime prior to contacting them about cancelling, and I really think that was a big factor in getting me out of their clutches.
Yes, the audio quality is highly compressed, it's so they can squeeze more channels onto the signal that is beamed down from the satellites. I've gotten used to it and don't notice it anymore, and if I really like the song and want to hear it in the best quality, I'll buy it on my phone and play it over bluetooth. I really wish they would consolidate the sirius and the xm satellites and dedicate more bandwidth to the music channels. We pay a good penny to listen, would it really kill them to up the quality a little?
I was an XM customer before their merger with Sirius. IMO the merger marked the downfall of the service, both in signal quality and programming. I cancelled 4 (yes, 4!) service contracts. And boy, getting them off your back is about as frustrating as things can be. They can't afford to lose a single customer, as they have been existing on a financial tight-wire for years now.
