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Satellite Radio Systems Compared
The NYT has a review/comparison of XM radio and Sirius, the two systems of digital satellite radio. Not everyone wants to pay for radio, but I guess if you spend enough time listening to it, maybe it's worthwhile.
Yeah, I'd buy that for $10. Hmm... FP?
This sig no verb.
Delphi, the major maker of XM receivers has announced that they are moving all product design and engineering offshore because workers in the USA are paid too much.
You may want to take that into account when picking a system.
My folks just built a log home in an area where you can not get any cellular signal. You can barely pickup the nearest radio stations, and that's only if you hold your nose just right. TV via antenna is next to impossible thanks to our hills that surround the home. Satelitte isn't just used by radio aficionados. Real folks like you and I sometimes need it.
not worth it. You'd have to spend quite a bit of time in your vehicle to make staellite radio worth the cost that it is now. One may as well invest in a multi-disc changer that reads MP3 discs. This way you can have hours upon hours of music that you choose, commercial free. Hopefully, if/when a song sharing service comes around that is legal and not stomped by the RIAA, people will pay the cost per song, be able to burn them all to CD, and then listen in the car. I don't see how paying a monthy fee for satellite radio is even justified when we already have the technology to give ourselves hours of music on a single CD. IMHO, staellite radio hasn't really taken off, and I don't think it ever will. It just seems like a bad trend.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
Is there censorship???
That's the one thing that bugs me more than anything else about an AM / FM radio. When I listen to songs, I'm tired of the FCC regulating stations, and butchering songs I would otherwise appreciate into beeps, buzzes, silent space, and otherwise crap FX.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I couldn't care less about having a radio station that I could bring with me across the country. I'm more concerned about
a) Having a radio station not play the same thing 20x a day and
b) Having them NOT butcher the song.
Of course, I've been to all the places, Best Buy, etc and ask them. They don't know. I don't have any friends with this device.
So for now, it's a no go. Not until I know that it's uncensored, and always will be that way.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I listen to Sirius everyday at work for about 4-8 hours a day. Now that I have it, I would say that I would have to quit my job if I ever could not listen to it for some reason. I fly aerial surveying missions, and it can get very boring up there with nothing to do. Now I have a way to have entertainment anywhere in the country, even in the middle of the desert at 12000 feet!!
I have 100 channels to chose from, and have yet to get bored of the 5 or 6 I listen to regularly. I personally think Sirius is much better than XM, mainly for these "streams" as they call them: 2 NPRs, PRI and JamOn. There defiantly is a reason to pay for radio!
5 years from now the only system in use could be [thisNewSystem], leaving you looking not just like a betamax weenie, but like a betamax weenie without any tapes...
Late 90's I was trying to buy a small(ish) portable DAB-radio (Digital Audio Broadcasting; not by satelite), but there just were none available on the market (and the "desktop"-models were too expensive to be worth it, IMHO).
Then I got myself one of those, at the time, brand new 20 GB iPods, and I never thought about (digital) radio again.
Currently I'm carrying around just under a week worth of music, comedy and, soon enough, even some books... listening to the music you like without paying a monthly fee (for music you can't even keep) sure beats radio.
Oh, I also do some time-shifting of netradio, so if I grow tired of those 10(ish) GB of music I've already got, there's always new content available to me.
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
But they're hardly the problem. CC is a clumsy puppy -- well intentioned, but poorly trained. Since the mid-80's on the FM dial, and the early-90's on the AM dial, there hasn't been a whole lot of variety. Every market has a whacky Morning Zoo show on a heavy metal or top 40 station. They play bits created by a syndicator, and pass them off as "something funny we came up with last night." Then you have the AM stations which are either syndicated AM talk, or satelitte religious programming.
:-) I'm sitting in a station newsroom right now, at work, so I think I know what I'm talking about here. And no, I don't work for Clear Channel.
So, what's Clear Channel done? They're trying to make their AM stations like local TV stations. Local news/issues programs during prime time, and well-known network programming other times. For the music stations, it's even easier. They've got vertical integration among the stations, with playlists based on formats. Go ahead, examine the playlists of stations in the same format owned by companies other than Clear Channel. By and large, it's the same music.
The only real difference between markets is the level of talent and the fit and polish of the delivery. In big markets, you get good jocks and tight production. In small markets, you can hear some pretty awful radio.
As for XM, I've done three cross-country trips in the past two years via auto. I don't think I'd want to do it without an XM receiver. While there is some good local stuff out there, XM is good quality wherever you happen to be, and it's consistent. Montana is big, and sometimes you can't find a station for a couple of hours. I think the talk programming is better on XM than on Sirius, but that's just personal opinion. If you really dig on NPR, Sirius would probalby be more your cup of tea.
I just bought a dvd burner and plan to pick up a ~$40 dvd player that plays mp3s. Most of the ones I've seen have a seperate power supply and I'll build a small power converter so it will be happy with the 12v in my car and then hook up to the aux-in on my pioneer.
Instant 4.7gigs of audio files and a remote control to boot. Even with my wide range of tastes ( some say bizarre) I'll only need a few discs worth to take my entire collection. Simple matter to re-rip all the Beatles albums at higher bitrates too since I'm not trying to cram stuff onto CD-Rs.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Of course it is. What, you expect me to lay aside rational thought because of personal investment in the outcome? You probably want victims deciding punishment for criminals, instead of impartial judges, too.
The efficient worker is adaptable and retrains. He doesn't rely on protectionism to keep his job at the expense of the buying power of everyone else in his country.
Get off my launchpad!
One thing that's still keeping me from taking the XM plunge is the lack of decent in-dash receivers. Sure, there are plenty of receivers that are "XM Ready" (though they all seem to require an additional $200+ receiver module that I'll have to attach somewhere else in the car). But most of them have only 8- or 16-character displays.
I mean, most cars these days (or so it seems -- all of our last cars at least) have large receiver openings (double-size or so). There's PLENTY of space for a CD / XM receiver with a nice, multi-line display and decent controls. But even the double-DIN receivers from Pioneer still only have 8-character displays. It's crazy.
And I don't even get me started on how most radios these days are just an ugly mess of widgets and doodads with very little thought to function or quality. The best-looking, most functional, radios out there all seem to be original factory radios. And they simply don't have the MP3 / Satellite features.
What I want, basically, is the nice Delphi XM receiver integrated in a double-DIN CD receiver, with aux inputs for my MP3 player, a half-dozen preset buttons, a volume knob, and a tuning / navigation / feature knob. Is that too much to ask? (and, no, I don't want to stick the Delphi receiver somewhere else on my dash -- with my Palm/GPS combo, I've already got more velcro then I'd really like.)
I have a Kenwood Here2Anywhere reciever, with a home reciever cradle in my living room, and a reciever cradle in both of my vehicles. One think I must say is that the stock setup for the vehicles SUCK! They come with a tape deck adapter, and my unit bearly puts out enough power to the tape deck that you have to turn the volume all the way up to hear the audio. In my other vehicle, I didn't have a tape deck, so I bought a $45 FM modulator that you have splice into the antenna. This systme works much better, and sound quality is excelent. If you are thinking of purchasing any of the protable units, make sure you have an auxilary audio-in on your car sterio system. If not, don't use the dinky tape deck setup, spring for a FM modulator. The Kenwood FM modulator I purchased uses RCA cables for the audio in. So if you mount an RCA plug set up on your dash, you could use it for not only your satilite system, but you could plug in a CD player, or any other audio device that has an RCA out.
I had been looking at Satellite radio for awhile, but always concluded that I did not want to pay $10 - $13 a month for the service... So I never bothered to purchase the equipment.
While cruising one of my daily sites, someone had posted a message that Sears had a Sirius radio package deal... everything you need to get Sirius up and running for $50. I figured, for that price, I couldn't lose.
It tooks 2 months, and Sears finally cancled my order because they realized that the demand for the box set had exceeded the order. I was pissed off. Not because they misjudged the amount of orders that would come in... That's somewhat understandable. I would have let the subject drop right there if that was the problem. But no.. they had CHARGED my card two months ago, and I was thus paying interest (actually, it was a debit card, but Sears didn't know that) for two months on a product I didn't have. That's what really ticked me off... they took my money, used it for 2 months, and then said "oh... sorry, here's your money back, and we won't pay you interest." I wasn't about to stand for that.
I stomped down to my local Sears and bitched up a storm. They finally agreed to cobble together a similar Sirius system and give it to me for the $50 price.
The next day, I installed the system, via the FM modulator and got it hooked up. It was pretty easy to install myself. I had never installed any radio equipment in a vehicle before. Learned quite a bit, actually. Anyway, it fired right up and sounded a lot better than I was expecting considering it was via FM modulator. In fact, it sounded just like my stock head unit.
I'm not a big fan of stock head units, but I have not replaced my current head unit in my vehicle, even though I've had it 3.5 years. Boy... am I glad I waited.
I'm going to be getting a Sirius head unit, so I can plug directly into it. I love the Sirius, and I won't ever be going back to "regular" FM radio again. I will happily pay the $13/mo that I was reluctant to pay after actually using the system. The lack of commercials is so liberating. It's so frigging nice to turn on the radio, and listen without hearing all the bullshit I hear on FM stations. I have about 6 channels I listen to regularly, and I can usually find someone on one of the 6 that I like at any given time. There are a few occasions when all six channels suck, and I will jump around and experiment with other stations.
There are a few nitpicks that I have, though.
First, the fact that Kenwood Sirius tuners are not compatible with Panasonic Sirius tuners is ridiculous. They are both Sirius tuners, they should be compatible with any Sirius head unit. The upside of this is, the Kenwood Sirius tuner is $150, and is what I currently have. The Panasonic tuner is $50. Why is that important? Because all but the most expensive ($500) Kenwood Head Units suck. Really bad. Their LCD displays are like 10 Character, vintage 1990's displays. On the other hand, the Panasonic head unit (983 I think?) has a nice Active Matrix display for $200. That's the head unit I'm going to be buying here after Christmas... but I'm going to have to plunk down an additional $50 for the Panasonic Sirius tuner... which kind of irks me.
The other nitpick I have, which may or may not go away with the new head unit is the fact that channel surfing is exceptionally difficult. It's hard to find the stations you might want to listen to, and skip over the junk you know for sure you don't want to listen to. Currently, on the FM modulator, there's only 6 preset buttons, with 4 different positions. So you can have a total of 24 presets. However, getting to the 2, 3 and 4th position pre-sets is a pain in the ass. So I pretty much stick with the first 6 pre-sets.
Couple the fact that the FM modulator is a Kenwood unit, with it's 10 character display, and it's impossible to have the information you want on the screen up at any given time. You are limited to a portion of the song title, OR