Sirius XM sound quality

Recommend this... the speakers in your truck are terrible (as were mine in my OR):

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/premium-audio-upgrade-for-less-than-250.510424/

XM will sound much better but it is still a highly compressed audio format. I just listen to XM streamed from my phone unless I’m off the grid - quality is night and day

 

Yep, I was hoping nobody would notice... that was a change of thought from "through a blanket" to "throwing a blanket over the speakers"

 

I'm glad it was able to get it by trial but I'm canceling after my $2 trial extension.

 

Ahhhh... You might be right there. I believe most of the radio stations around me are HD.

 

I have the JBL head unit and when I listen to HD radio it sounds great but cuts in and out a lot. When I had Sirius it always sounded like crap and anytime I was in the city near buildings, or in any hilly areas it would cut in and out something terrible. I've allso noticed that when listening to regular radio I dont have to have it turned up as loud as I do when listening to Sirius.

 

I've been using XM since it's inception. It doesn't matter the quality of your system, the clarity and quality has always lacked in clarity and sound quality. I have noticed, the further from cities and populations you are, the clearer and less muffled it sounds.

When re-subscribe time comes, I always bitch about the sound quality and wind up with an offer of a heaping discount for the year. This doesn't always work but it has in the past.

 

The best they offered me this last time was $5/mo. I honestly thought they would do better but they didn't. I said no thanks.

 

Wait for a day or so. Call back, but don't go into it looking for a fight. It usually took a couple or three calls to be productive and it gave me a chance to adjust my strategy.

 

So how did you make out? The best I've ever been offered was $5 a month for 6 months.

 

Satellite radio audio differs on each channel. Never really great and some poor. You can pay a fortune in speakers...to no avail. I like to crank up Willy Nelson's Country channel and its lack of commercials; but my wife likes talk radio, so 90% of the time I suffer even more. The alternative Local radio drowns me with commercials, so that's out, period. But I love driving my Tacoma, XM or no XM!

 

I had XM in another vehicle with Bose speakers and noticed I had to turn the volume up more compared to when I was streaming Pandora or Spotify over my phone.

Got the Tacoma, noticed the effect even more in it. If you want to know how much XM compresses the data, stream XM over your phone bluetoothed into your Tacoma. It is a night and day difference in sound quality.

 

wtf is a castette?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_Satellite_Radio
"Each two-carrier group broadcast 100 8-kilobit-per-second streams in approximately 4 MHz of radio spectrum. These streams were combined using a patented process to form a variable number of channels using a variety of bitrates. Bandwidth is separated into segments of 4-kilobit-per-second virtual "streams" which are combined to form audio and data "channels" of varying bitrates from 4 to 64 kilobits-per-second"

Its worse then FM. Its worse then you even think it is. XM is complete shit. 4 - 64 kbps is insanity for 2019, when 128k MP3 was already a thing in the 90s. We now have 320kbps on all streaming services, and we are seeing some lossless formats gain more traction.

 

Just traded my fiance's car in on a Renegade Trailhawk. The satellite radio in that car sounds outstanding compared to my Taco. We've discovered some cool channels now and I was thinking about subscribing. I honestly wonder if it's just something wrong with our head units now. Maybe I'll see if I need to adjust some settings or something...

 

I've been listening on my trial after having been without satellite radio for several years. I subscribed to Sirius not long after it launched, back when it and XM were two separate companies.

From what I remember, I think it sounded better back then, and I was listening on the plug & play radios connected with FM modulators and aux/RCA cables. Sirius definitely used to allocate more bandwidth to music channels than they did the talk channels. One of the P&P radios I had was capable of pausing and rewinding/forwarding the stream. As I recall, it would only retain about 45-50 minutes of music audio, but would retain roughly 2-2.5 hours of talk audio. The music channels were noticeably better in audio quality than the talk channels. I would imagine nowadays that they're probably giving less and less bandwidth to the music channels resulting in lower quality.

I've also noticed that the signal in my Tacoma drops out more often than it did with my Sirius radios. I'm sure part of that is due to the buffer built in to those P&P units. However, the Sirius signal was always better than XM here in the mountains because of the orbit of the Sirius satellites. I don't know how much of that technical stuff is still true today. I would be curious to know if the SXM receiver in the Tacoma receives a signal from the Sirius or XM satellites, or both.

 

Depends on where you live. They use fewer satellites so coverage is terrible and getting worse. Too bad the technology is good but when the companies merged the fucked us all.