Wow, I'm going to go against the grain here and admit that
for me XM is still fine. I've had XM since 2003.
I have a couple of XM subscriptions on portable players that I use in the cars, home, and office, and get most of Sirius piped in via Dish Network at home. I listen to both on my setup. I listen to XM all day long at work, and frequently on trips. Can't live without it.
It
strongly depends on the channel and the content. I've heard content on both services that sounds like a 32kb MP3. Awful. I've also heard content that sounds quite good, perhaps that of 128kb or 192kb MP3's. That is to say, not SACD quality but perfectly sufficient.
SQ also depends on the equipment, as some of the newer receivers use different/newer codecs and will sound better. It also depends on what day of the week it is. If you follow the discussions over on XMFanclub.com, you will see constant threads about sound quality. It seems that (XM at least) tinkers with the compression all the time, and this becomes noticable from time to time.
For me, I mainly stick to classical and jazz, which seem to not suffer some of the compression problems of other channels. I think they sound fine. Yes, I can hear the compression, but it's certainly sufficient for the car, and good enough for
casual listening at home. No, I'm not going to demo my M80's with it, but it's fine for what it is.
XM Pops and Fine Tuning are two stations that (I have read) XM allocates plenty of bandwidth to, and it shows. They usually sound great.
Back to the OP. The only thing that 'XM Ready' gets you is the channel display on your receiver or TV screen, and possibly the receiver doing the decoding. The point is, I use my XM MyFi at home on my
non-XM Ready stereo via the home dock and plain old RCA cables, and it works just fine. I doubt you would get a sound quality difference in using an 'XM Ready' tuner.
Keep on truckin' with that 970 combo. Congrats on that. That $1298 package is a heck of a sweet deal. Let us know what you think of it.
