Hey Scott:
I've been spending more time here than I should today, and really have to get back to work... so PLEASE excuse this abbreviated reply!
~ I can't speak for Sirius, only XM... though my understanding is that much of this applies to both.
~ You might find the sound quality to be unacceptable at home with either service. I LOVE XM in my car and in a portable "walkman" type setup I have, but I literally can't stand to listen on my home sytem and am really angry about it! XM has added so many chnnels and has limited bandwidth, meaning they've substantially "upped" the compression! Two letters I posted in an XM forum to give you an idea of where I stand on XM of late:
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I've seen a huge decrease in XM sound quality as well and am ready to sell my Polk tuner and cancel the service.
It's "OK" sounding in the cars, the boombox and as a portable. But the Polk (which was purchased to enable higher-quality sound) is absolutely horrible on my main system. The "metallic" compressed sound makes it absolutely unlistenable. Granted, my speakers are known for exposing poor sound quality pretty easily.
I assume that XM, in it's quest to seem more desirable than Sirius by offering more channels to the average passerby at Best Buy, will continue down this path of aspiring to the lowest common denominator. As a business, they probably feel it's more profitable to keep adding new subscribers through marketing than concern yourself with the few you lose over sound quality. But I honestly feel that only works short-term. I know I used to tell people how great XM was...I was always "selling" it to others...but I don't anymore. And how will they lessen the number of channels now that they've been introduced?
I sure hope they have some plan to quickly use some miracle codec to improve the quality they'll get with this many channels and their bandwidth limits and the existing hardware.
I honestly feel like I've been stabbed in the back. I'm setup for XM everywhere and now find it largely unlistenable. Do I just sell all the hardware?
Imagine for a moment if your local cable company announced it was going to offer more and more obscure channels but lower the picture quality across the board.... and this after you just bought new high def TVs...... and there's no other cable option in your town.
If what XM is doing were being done to their TVs, people would riot in the streets.
I invested in them, I talked them up to my friends, and they've abandoned me, leaving me with purchased hardware that is now not useable because they've changed the rules. To say I'm pi**ed is a huge understatement.
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XM was promoted as having superior quality than FM radio. And yes, you can choose to discontinue service from your local cable company and stop renting their box....assuming you even need a box. It's a clean ending…. No harm, no foul.
I've
PURCHASED my XM receivers and ancillary equipment.... and did so based upon the quality I heard at the time of purchase. What do I do with the equipment investment... eBay? We both know I won't get crap for it.
Let me give you better analogy:
You purchase a nice upper-tier computer with the understanding that it's going to give you a much higher level of performance over the computer you've been using. Then over the next six or nine months, your computer is getting slower and slower. It's working slower than the old computer you replaced. It takes so long to do things that sometimes you just shut it down in frustration.
What exactly would your reaction be if you found out that the computer manufacturer had been "updating" you computer over that time with a bunch of programs that you have no interest in and therefore made the performance severely drop? They didn't ask you, they just lowered the performance from where it was when you purchased the computer because they thought you would like that program "Yak-shearing Sims". And, they are not acknowledging your problem nor are they announcing plans to bring your computers performance level back up. You can't uninstall those programs, can't add more RAM, can't defrag the drive. There's nothing you can do. The performance you have now is what the computer manufacturer
allows you to have... no more. And nowhere near the performance that was demo'd to you when you purchased that expensive new computer.
The computer isn't worth crap on eBay, so you're stuck with the purchase.
Tell me you wouldn't be enraged!!!??!!
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Can you tell you've hit a hot button with me????
~Evidently, there are differences in the sound quality between different generations of equipment (Unfortunately, I'm told the Polk used the first generation chipset despite being touted as an audiophile product). For this reason, I would NOT look to a receiver with XM built-in, because then you're stuck with that "generation" of tuner for a long time.
~If you're looking at a portable
anyway though, a home kit/dock is not that expensive and will make it far more convenient to move the portable from location to location!
