Dave:
I've found that XM sounds bad through ANY good home system.

XM is a bit of a sore point for me, as I feel they screwed their loyal users. I was a big fan and had receivers in both cars, a portable unit and a Polk "reference tuner" for my living room. All of this was bought when XM had "near" CD quality and advertised it as so. After about six months of my substantial equipment "buy in", they got into a marketing "number of channels" war with Sirius. They went from ~100 channels initially to 170 if I remember correctly. Problem is, the FCC only allowed them so much bandwidth and so they had to compress everything more and more to offer more channels. The sound quality dropped substantially. Not as noticeable in the car (granted, their primary market) but very noticeable in the home or on a portable.

After waiting a few more months to see if they produced some magical codec to improve the listening quality, I gave up and cancelled. I was out ~$600 or so, and I was pissed.

Some, in XM forums, said it was no big deal...it still sounded fine in their cars.

But I always compared the situation to satellite TV. What if you purchased a $600 receiver for a DirecTV-type company with the promise of excellent quality hi-def broadcasting, and after a few months, the quality was dropped down to standard def for marketing reasons?

Some sympathized with that analogy, others just called me a troll because THEY thought it sounded fine.

Either way, XM (and now Sirius) will never see another dime from me.

In all fairness, when I bought a new vehicle this Fall and got 3 months of XM on trial, I DID enjoy listening to blues or comedy or political talk on longer rides. But not enough to give them $$$ once the trial period was over.

Wait.

What was the question?

Oh yeah... it'll sound pretty bad.

::::::: No disrespect to Axiom, but my favorite woofer is my yellow lab :::::::