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Satellite Radio - XM vs. Sirius?
"So far I have gathered that XM seems to have better audio quality, and a larger selection of music channels. Sirius has less music channels, but more "commercial free" music channels and more talk channels. Also, it scares me that Clear Channel has a stake in XM -- does this mean XM will eventually turn to utter crap like every Clear Channel station seems to have? Does Clear Channel have enough ownership to have a say in programming?
I'm looking for more strengths and weaknesses from people who have used one (or better yet, both!) of the services. I'm leaning towards XM right now, with the Clear Channel issue being my main fright. Sirius streams their stations online, giving me a good sample. So far I have been fairly impressed. But, I like the fact that XM carries Art Bell, more than one 80's station, and VH1 content. It's a toss up, so I'm looking forward to some info from the Slashdot community."
I believe Sirius is going out of business. So much so that I shorted the stock a while ago and made a bundle off it. (Already covered the short, so there's no conflict of interest in this advice).
I doubt Sirius be around in 2 years. You might want to go with XM just so you don't have to buy a new head unit in a couple years.
there are several in-dash MP3 players that also support sirius and xm.
check out these:
Alpine 7897 (XM ready)
Kenwood Excelon KDC-X659 (sirius ready)
There's actually a bunch. Check Crutchfield....
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
I personally love my XM radio. Lots of different channels w/ lots of music choices. There are about 100 channels with 30 being commercial free. Channels are setup into neighborhoods occording to genre / music type. It's $10 a month for the service and I am very happy with it. I am currently using the Sony fm modulator model and get excellent sound quality. I have only lost signal twice. Once 2 levels down in a parking garage and once while I was in Harpers Ferry WV I was driving past a mountain and had no view of the southern sky. An excellent product and well worth it!!!!!
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. RUSH
We have ALL seen how quickly networks that aren't at the top can fall over. The network is only as strong as its customer base.
XM has a strong ad campaign, has been out longer, is cheaper (10 a month vs 12.99? I think..), more people have heard of XM, and if I am going to as a production company go with one of the Satilite Radio networks, I am going to go with XM, because more people are going to use it.
In addition, I believe that XM has deals with some major car companies, to install XM radios on many of their cars, and some are prepaying to subscription fee (which in the scope of a car purchase isn't that much really). XM has better numbers (their stock that is). They only needed 60,000 users to break even i think, but they will have over a half million i think by the end of the year.
I might be wrong on a few of those facts, but I think I am right on most of them. Overall XM seems to be better (and my XM stock has performed alot better, I wouldn't touch Sirus at all, except to short it!)
Overall, check their stock news, etc.... its got some great info. You don't want a receiver that in one a year will be nothing more than a Busted Tech company reminder (think of BS Zelda on Nintendo, 300 dollars, and it didn't last more than 3 weeks...)
Tibbon
tibbon.com
There are also XM only tuners, which play through your existing stereo via RF modulation, like a lot of CD Changers use.
I'm looking at the add-ons now, because I don't want to have a crappy, ill-fitting tuner in my dash. (I drive a Dodge Durango, and the Stereo is over sized... I hate the look of spacers, etc.)
Sony makes an Add-on tuner that is dockable, and the you can get an additional dock for use in the home. That way, you can take the XM into the house at night, if you wanted to. You do need an additional antenna though.
Also, keep in mind that the prices you see never seem to include the antennas. Apparently, $199 for the tuner is for the non-working solution. It takes some more money to get a functioning solution.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
The main problem for me is the fact that you have to pay a monthly subscription fee. That's really hard for me to wrap my head around, since I'm so used to paying nothing. For a fee of $10/month or whatever they charge, I would expect ALL commercial-free programming. However, they only claim that "most" of their stations are commercial-free. Why am I supposed to pay for stations with commercials? Even if it were truly commercial-free, I wouldn't want to pay. That's just too annoying. I have enough bills to pay without having yet another one buzzing around.
Also, I'm unconvinced that it works well in metro areas. Like GPS, the signal gets blocked by obstructions like buildings, trees, etc. To get around this, they have repeaters in places where the signal is likely to get blocked. I'd put money on those transmitters not doing the trick everywhere you might go in, say, SF or New York, where you would expect lots of repeaters, much less smaller population centers that still have tall buildings. And what do you want to bet that it won't work for crap in mountainous areas where there are absolutely no repeaters.
Why pay for the novelty of receiving radio from satellites if it has to fall back to a more conventional terrestrial transmission much of the time anyway? Truly, the only real use I can see for this is if you travel cross-country a lot and want to be able to hear the same stations wherever you go, or if you use it at home and are just really married to some station on XM or Sirius that you can't get elsewhere.
I played with the service at Launch. I had the Sony "Radar Detector" style receiver. It had only 5 presets, but a fast (cached) channel listing. Make SURE you buy a radio that caches the names in memory! Otherwise you will wait forever to see the name of the station, or be forced to memorize the numbers.
Also, the bitrate for XM was 64k for music, and even less for voice. Voice is ok, better than AM, but music was very narrow and weak in the midrange in my vehicle. I have not heard Sirrius in anything other than a trade show environment, but you should listen to the audio in a vehicle and hear the dynamics.
A white paper I read on the subject said that the Sirrius bitrate was higher than XM which should clean up the audio.
XM's terrestrial repeaters in Dallas worked great. You could sit under a gas station awning, or drive thru the city and still hear satellite radio!
how do they stop you from using the system?
By slapping a $100,000 fine on you for breaking the DMCA. Looking at the notes on 17 USC 1201, I find that this (preventing freeloaders from eavesdropping on subscription content) is actually what the DMCA's circumvention ban was designed for, not for preventing people from playing what they have already bought.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I bought an Alpine headend with the intent to use XM because they were going live first. I also own a 60 gig Dension DMP3 player that is hooked up to my trucks sound system. When I got the XM installed, I totally stopped listening to regular FM. Now-a-days, I mostly listen to my MP3 player for music, but I frequently listen to the comedy channels, C-NET radio, and BBC on XM. I am usually in my truck from 2.5 to 4 hours per day, so I get a lot of listening in. :)
:) I complained to their feedback address, and received a prompt reply stating that they were aware of the problem and were in the process of reworking these bits to be much better. Now, the unused ad spots have info spots like "Today in Music History" and other similar things. Channel style spots will take the form of telling you interesting information and then a quick one-liner for the channel number. I was very pleased with the change. :)
As far as XM signal quality, it does cut out for not more than one second several times on my trip (Rt. 3, 495, 95 from NH to Boston), most of these cutouts are under bridges. They are mildly irritating, but not enough to discourage my listening.
They appear to be listening to their customer base too. When I started out, they had a lot of dead advertising slots that they were filling up with ads for other XM channels. Some of these ads were enough to make me scream and throw the radio out the window.
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
bad prices, though. Anything you find at Crutchfield you can usually find somewhere else for at least 10% less.
OTOH, car audio is a major racket and there are lots of shady people in it. Crutchfield doesn't even try to compete on price, they compete on service. You can get some things cheaper elsewhere, but you might be paying someone who definitely doesn't deserve the money.
I've been watching the Satellite Radio market for the past 5 years business-wise, and I've chosen Sirius Radio.
)
Top 5 Reasons:
1) No commercials.
2) 3 Satellites
3) Just released the PAC v4 Audio Codec; derived from a series of unique technologies that include the latest generation of psychoacoustic modeling, based on a deeper understanding of hearing physiology. This new coded beats XM's previous audio comparison hands-down. (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020610/nym024_1.html
4) NPR.
5) Sirius has the business advantage of being the second on the market. They can learn from XM's mistakes without making a fool out of themselves.
5a) The cool little dog logo.
and I haven't bought a new CD or touched MP3s in three months.
It's that good. Where to start....
1. Content: Excellent. The 6 or 7 rock channels are superb and all are commercial free. I start my day out with Fred, Channel 44, and listen to a little alternative music. Move over to Unsigned, channel 51 and listen to the new bands that are up and coming. Some really good stuff there. Decide I want to make the commute a little better, so I flip over to CHannel 160, Comedy XL and enjoy some of the stand up bits they play constantly from people like Margaret Cho, Chris Rock, Denis Leary, and a whole bunch of other talented, dirty comedians. Next switch is to BBC World Service, then onto Discovery Radio News where I listen to a bit about the Endeavour Mission to the Space shuttle.
Memorial Day Weekend: XM Special channel 30 plays surf music all weekend long to kick off the start of the summer. Excellent!
I can literally listen to more music than I could possibly have in my car in the form of $15 CDs with 12 songs on them. Bluegrass, country, the best of the 70s, Classic rock,Opera, Broadway shows, they even had a John Williams special on the Show-Tunes channel and I was driving down the road listening to the Vader Theme from Star Wars. They also had Blues Traveller perform live, interviewed Mic Jagger once, and many others.
Talk- Great selection. Phil Hendrie, the funniest man in radio is on in the afternoon on 166, The Buzz.
2. Audio Quality and clarity- Excellent for the most part. I'd say the sound quality is just below that of a CD, but I have the Sony plug and play unit that interfaces into my cassette player in my car. I didn't want to get a new head unit. It sounds excellent at home plugged into my receiver. The sony unit also has a USB connection on the back for future connectivity with a PC, I assume.
I live in Los Angeles, and in some parts of the City, the signal will go uninterrupted even under bridges. I was under the impression they didn't have the audio repeaters up yet (due to fights with the Cell phone companies and the NAB), but in some areas of LA you can be in a deep dark tunnel and still hear your radio. In the suburbs, however, a bridge will temporarily knock out your reception.
Sirius isn't even nation-wide yet. They don't anticipate a full launch until August. As far as Clear Channel investing in XM, it's not a worry. XM is selling a service. XM is the new HBO of Radio and they are not going to screw it up. It's their business model to say they are different from FM, Clear Channel is just providing content, especially the talk shows. And BTW, Sirius is also being invested in by Infinity/CBS, another major radio player.
As far as advertising, on the talk channels you may have up to 20 minutes per hour, but on XM content music channels, you won't find more than 6 minutes per hour, and there are 30 commercial free channels.
GO with XM. You will not regret it, I promise you. The variety of the content is just remarkable, you will want to drive around more or bring the unit into your house just to explore. This is the future fellas, I was skeptical at first, but now I don't want to be without it.
The two approaches have different plusses and minuses. With the geo-stationary birds, if you get a good signal in your driveway right now, you will most likely always get the same good signal there, while with the lower orbit birds the signal strength may cycle with position of the satellite. On the other hand, the lower orbit sats are much closer, and so might be able to get a stronger signal to you.
Neither approach has redundancy, as they need all their satellites for complete coverage. If one went down XM would have permanent dead zones, Sirius would have wandering dead zones. Take your pick.
XM's satellite info page
Sirius' fairly lame "how it works" (PDF)
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
XM's two satelites are in geostationary orbit, one towards the East coast, one towards the West. You have line of site to both of the all the time (well, probably). The only issue here is that since they're geostationary over the equator, that angle gets a little iffy in places like Seattle, where the satelites are always low on the horizon, and thus more easily blocked by buildings, CowboyNeal, etc. This, however, makes it easy to set up ground based repeaters because you can point the ground repeaters at a satelite and leave them alone.
Sirius' three satelites are in elliptical orbits, and two of the three are over the continental US at all times. The orbits make the angles better (less likely to be blocked by building because the satelite is more likely to be overhead, even in Seattle), but makes doing ground based repeaters hella hard. Sirius rents bandwidth on K-band IIRC to beam signal to the ground based repeaters, which is more expensive and more complicated, but works nonetheless.
That third satelite doesn't do much for reliability. If you lose it, you're going to have areas of the country not getting signal for a good portion of the day, which isn't much better than having portions of the country not getting signal most of the day in the case of XM.
And as far as being money hungry, IIRC these are both publicly traded companies with corporate partners. They both want to make money, and neither of them has your best interests at heart no matter how good their marketspeak is. There is no good guy here. You can morally oppose Clear Channel, and XM by extension. Go ahead. Just remember that its your opinion, and you'll be fine.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Also, I have found that, depending on the area of the country you live in, you may find that internal mounting of antennas (under rear windows, for example) is quite feasible. I have a Terk antenna mounted on the back shelf of my car and it works fine in Arizona. Some people in areas with more trees do complain about drop outs due to heavy foliage, etc. So be aware of your surroundings...
Actually, XM and Sirius have an MOU on the books that basically promises to make the technologies compatible in the future so that a consumer can buy one unit and use either service.
It may go belly up, but that is very doubtful. Right now, 2003 cadillacs have xm. With GM switching the rest of cars over in later 2003 and should be in every new by 2005.
Sirius has Ford. (I think, I cant remember the exact list.) Not to mention numerous after market companies using xm and sirius. This isnt going to die out anytime soon as it will be very wide spread.
The only downfall they have is buying the deck, the antenna and the xm/sirius receiver. That gets very expensive like any other new product on the market. Just wait till the competition heats up and prices should plummet.
Unless you want to lose the use of the integration features on most new cars (My Aztek has the radio that integrates with the HUD, the speedometer to adjust volume the faster you go, alarm integration, user integration (radio presets and all other settings including EQ along with seat position and mirror position change depending what key is used to start the vehilce/keyfob used to open the doors) or my steering wheel controls.
There is nothing on the market that has XM capability (or any aftermarket for that matter) that can integrate with today's advanced vehicular computer systems. getting XM and losing all that is not a worthwile trade off. and the XM tuner is a pure joke.. the reason for XM radio is for CD quality, not to listen to really crappily modulated FM (as the modulators are of the crappiest quality.)
Pay really close attention, if you buy a cheapie car that has no systems integration then you are set, but most any modern car with luxury options cannot have the radio replaced without losing a ton of features.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm seeing a lot of people concerned with the head units in regards to XM radio, and this is somewhat baffling. I have XM radio installed, and some of the questions here seem irrelevant.
The XM radio has three separate components. You have the antenna, which attaches to the top of the vehicle, then you have the decoder which decodes the satellite signal. Finally, you need some sort of receiver, like an XM compatible head unit. XM radio can also be installed by putting an FM modulator in, requiring no replacement of the head unit. You also have the option of purchasing an XM compatible head unit, however. This is nice because everything is all in one unit, but if this isn't possible, you get a small square control device for it.
It's also important to remember that if you have a Pioneer head unit that's XM compatible, you *have* to have a Pioneer decoder. A friend of mine has a Sony XM compatible head unit, and he's still waiting for Sony's decoder to come out. As far as I know, Pioneer is the only one that has a complete decoder/modulator combination in place.
As far as Sirius goes, I've never heard of it, and I've never seen any head units supporting it. Sounds like a bad idea, to me. Overall, I spent about 300 for the install/setup, and it's 10 bucks a month.
I went with XM Radio, and a Sony XM01 receiver. Most audio comparisons between the two favor XM's sound quality over Sirius. I haven't listened to Sirius, so I can't comment on the channel lineup, but they seemed pretty similar in terms of no-commercial channels and breadth.
Choose your receiver carefully. Don't let them sell you an "FM Modulator" -- hardwire your receiver to get all that sound quality you pay for. After all, an FM Modulator can only sound as good as FM.
The Sony receiver is nice, and I like that it is removable. However, it has some drawbacks. The blue-backlit screen is terribly blurry and hard to read, especially at a quick you-should-be-driving glance. It only has five presets, which is fewer than I would like on a lineup of 100 channels.
The XM programming so far has been terrific. No complaints there. Ethel rocks.
For all those hosers and thread-crappers saying "Get an MP3 player", "Get a CD Changer", you miss the point! I'm tired of listening to the same CDs I've heard before. Where do you go to hear something new? Your own CD collection? Your own MP3s? I go to the radio, and XM Radio beats FM.
I run http://www.clubxm.com you should check it out. Everybody there has either or service. Sirius is avaliable in some states and nationwide on 7/1. XM has more music channels then Sirius. The commercials on XM are hardly noticed. I've heard maybe 15 commercials in the 5 months I have had XM. Mostly for which are for other channels on the XM dial.
Don't forget that XM has defective Boeing satellites, ones that have rapid degeneration of the solar array.
3 71 1
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2101_89
I've read that in as little as 2-3 years they will have to start shutting down channels. And I can't see them being able to replace the satellites so soon.
Cash wise, Sirius has more money available, while XM has been close to going broke for the past year.
XM's ties to Clear Channel also bother me. CC has ruined local radio in many a market, mine included.
For $2 more a month, Sirius has NO commercials at all on ANY of the music channels. THAT, to me, is worth it, and the ONLY reason why I'd go with one of these.
Isn't the whole point of getting one of these things to get greater diversity of programming, and get away from having penis enhancment and hair restoration snake oil, plus annoying car dealer ads blasted at you for 6-10 minutes at a time between song sets?
I don't like the idea of paying for music radio, that I can get for "free", when it's also going to have ads. And given XM's financial condition (and ties to Clear Channel) there is no guarantee that the length of the stopsets won't increase to resemble typical commercial FM radio.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I have Sirius through my Kenwood head unit. The sound quality on the talk and news channels was somewhat strange to begin with, but either Sirius has upped the data rate on some of their stations, or I'm just getting used to it, because I can't tell the difference in sonic quality between Sirius and a good FM station any more. The only channels that seemed to have weird artifacts were the talk channels, anyways. I'd assume they had those set to low data rates to begin with, because they thought they could get away with it, but people complained so they upped the bandwidth. I have also had excellent reception in my area (Iowa) with interstate overpasses hardly ever interrupting the signal. Since the satellites actually move, and there is more than one over head most of the time, I usually get signals from a good angle even if something is obscuring the view directly over the car. I mostly use Sirius for NPR, PRI and BBC reception, because most american radio stations play nothing but mindless pap (Clear Channel being the worst offender, IMHO)
The Beta that is still used in "the entertainment industry" (I think you mean "broadcast television") is BetaCam and BetaCam SP.
BetaCam and BetaCam SP are NOT the same as BetaMax. BetaMax is a watered down version of BetaCam and was geared towards home use. For all practical purposes BetaMax and VHS were identical in quality.
You might find the following format guide of interest.
http://www.high-techproductions.com/formats.htm
I believe "KISS" is now a kind of "pseudo-format" used by ClearChannel. That is, several stations advertise themselves as "KISS-FM" but they have different actual call letters, and they all have similar playlists (I mean, more similar than all of the other ClearChannel stations).
And it's not surprising that your KISS actually was issued those call letters, since ClearChannel is based in San Antonio.
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
NPR recently had a segment on satellite radio which compares XM and Sirius in some detail. If you're in the market, check it out.