sirius vs. xm?

[mikesoc82]

what the oppion out there..

[96firebird311]

Never used either personally.....and won't for a long time... :( I live in Hawaii. :D But I have heard over and over again the Sirius plays better songs.

[CaLiJeRk]

I used to work in the car audio dept at Best Buy for 3 years. I have XM, one of the other installers had sirius. There isn't much different between them. XM is partially commercial free, sirius is completely commercial free. XM is 9.95 a month and Sirius is 12.95 a month. You only hear about 1 commercial an hour on XM. XM i hear alot of the same **** most the time. My buddy with sirius says he hears a variety of stuff most the time.

I think it dpends alot on which brand of radio you have. If you have Alpine, Sony, Pioneer, Delphi you have to go XM. Kenwood, Jenson and some others only have sirius.

hope this helps

[andrew.brandon]

In the 03 Oct. edition of Car Audio and Electronice they compared the two.

" I did find that XM seems to preserve the integrity of the original recording better than Sirius. On XM, crappy recordings sound like crappy recordings, and well recorded material sounds like it should-great. Sirius seems to improve the older and poorly recouded software, giving it a larger dynamic range and improved frequency response. But, on high quality recordings, I found it sounded over-processed."

On news stations " I found XM contained a smoother voice quality and that Sirius had an accentuated sibilance problem"

Also said that the Sirius Kicked better in the low freq's while XM sounded better in the mid to high Freq's.

" As I stated earlier, Sirius aims for a young, edgier customer with a more modern music taste and XM is aiming at a more mature audience through older music genres."


I also heard somewhere receiently that XM was adding like 15 new channles to the programing. Hope this helps.

[Burnout]

Everything I've heard, Sirius is the better of the two.

[Javelin3o4]

Sirius is also suppose to add video broadcast soon.

[nikon]

I have XM...now, it is too MY knowledge that XM has far more satelites and more of a capacity than sirius does about a 3-1 ratio, say one bird goes out in sirius, your done and no more music, XM keeps on kickin....the whole mature audience for XM is kinda correct, but at the same time I'm 18 and find myself listening to the same things I have for years...XM plays alot of your favorite songs...however you will hear a new song on the radio before you do XM...just my opinion...I love my XM though

[96firebird311]

Originally posted by nikon:
I have XM...now, it is too MY knowledge that XM has far more satelites and more of a capacity than sirius does about a 3-1 ratio

The last I knew, XM only had two satellites. One called "rock" and the other called "roll".

[CAMAROWIDBASS]

Originally posted by andrew.brandon:
[QB

" As I stated earlier, Sirius aims for a young, edgier customer with a more modern music taste and XM is aiming at a more mature audience through older music genres."[/QB]

i didnt know that.

[andrew.brandon]

Not my words, theirs.

[ddolak]

I know this is an old topic, but I must put in my 2 cents.

XM has two geostationary satellites in orbit above the equator. This means that each serves one half of the US with some overlap and as the earth rotates, the satellite goes with it. Their names are "rock" and "roll". They have a 3rd satellite on the ground in storage in case one in orbit goes out. If this were to happen, service would be interupted for several months to customers who happen to be on the coast which had the satellite failure until the backup satellite could be launched.

Sirius has 3 satellites in elliptical orbits. That means they orbit going north to south to the equator and back. At any given time, two of them is above the US, and one in down around the equator. This enables Sirius to have at least 16 hours a day service even if one satellite does go down. They have a 4th backup satellite in storage also, in case one fails. Therefore, Sirius is better prepared to handle any disaster than XM. The north-south range also allows Sirius to provide service to Canada and possibly Mexico in the future.

I have Sirius and it provides a great variety of music. More so than XM (my friend has it). Plus I get all the NFL and NHL games. Its cool if you root for a team and live in a different city. I.E. I'm a huge Denver Broncos fan and I get to listen to the games in Sirius wherever I am. I live in L.A.

Sirius is also going to be rolling out TV service in 2005. If you have kids and go on long trips, it should be awesome. RV'ers should like this feature too.

XM has the catchy name, so more people are signing up for it than Sirius. You can make an argument for both really. I prefer Sirius.

[user1101]

Originally posted by ddolak:
I know this is an old topic, but I must put in my 2 cents.

I'm glad you revived it. I didn't pay any attention to it and missed something that should be pointed out:

Originally posted by andrew.brandon:
In the 03 Oct. edition of Car Audio and Electronice they compared the two.

" ... Sirius seems to improve the older and poorly recouded software, giving it a larger dynamic range and improved frequency response.

The magazine writer has lost all credibility with me. While it's certainly possible to fiddle with the frequency response to make old recordings sound better, it's impossible to improve the response by increasing the dynamic range. Increasing an 8-bit recording to a 32 or 40 bit-depth will just take up more space without increasing your range. Once the audio is mastered at an 8-bit depth, every sample has been binned into one of those 256 (2^8) values. It's just the nature of the A2D process.

Here's an analogy: if I have a box of 64 crayolas, and I break each of them into three pieces, how many more colors did I gain?

The author is 1) throwing technical terms out that he doesn't understand and 2) trying to convince himself that he can hear a difference between the quiets and louds when they don't exist.

I'll bet dollars to donuts that the magazine didn't do any double-blind experiments. They never do, because they almost always yield no difference between quality equipment and "super-duper-audiophile" equipment. The speaker-wire market is a prime example.

[crasher]

I have serius in my car right now and I love it. Got it installed about 6 or so munths ago and I havn't turned on my regular radio since then and probably never will again.

[BobsSilverSix]

I know this is probaly a bad question but what would I use to hook up my Sirius reciever to my Monsoon deck?

[BobsSilverSix]

I know this is probaly a bad question but what would I use to hook up my Sirius reciever to my Monsoon deck?