Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Couple of Questions for Everyone

I hope that i might again ask the group here for some advice. I have two questions:

1. what's the difference between RG59 & RG6 cabling? I have to run a seperate line for my satellite on the roof to the downstairs.

2. at the risk of promoting a war, i'd like to know which satellite radio i should be looking at - Sirius or XM? Both seem to have their advantages and disadvantages. I was looking at either a Sirius Starmate or a XM Audiovox XCS9/Delphi Roady XT/Audiovox XMCK10C. A couple of questions related to this i had were:
-do i need the home kit to enjoy either @ home? I think i have the headphone out to RCA adapter already but looks like i could use the extra antenna.
-is there any chance of using a seperate AC adapter or is it proprietary?
-what's the deal with a bunch of the receivers having XM capability now, are they all jumping on that bandwagon and how should that affect things?
All the models i'm looking at seem to have built in FM transmitters as well as remotes included, but appears the home kit will set me back an additional $50-70 depending on which model i choose.

thanks in advance for everyone's help
Scott

1. The difference is the size of the center conductor, which affects attenuation loss. RG6 has the larger center and you can therefore use it over greater distances with less signal loss than the RG59.

2. No help on this one. Sorry!

do you think it would matter over a distance of about 20ft, Peter? That would get the cable inside to the hookup downstairs, at which point there would be another ~30ft of cabling in-house.

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!

I have a 60ft run of RG6 to my HTPC downstairs and it works fine.

Check the shielding as well. Line loss is less over distance with RG6, but for short, home-length runs, shielding is probably more important.

You'd probably be better off with RG59 quad-shield over a short run (line loss minimal, protection from interference) than RG6 dual-shield over the same distance. RG6 quad-shield would be better yet than both.

Bren R.

hey Mark/Randy,
Randy - you haven't tried this with RG59 have you? Only reason i'm asking is RG6 is 2-3 times the cost - not that either is very expensive but if i can save $10 or $20 doing a few runs for the satellite, i'll take it.

Mark - seems i have hit a bit of a nerve, but i understand completely why you are upset. I am thinking at this time that I won't use the sat radio in the house that often, but much moreso in the car to compensate for the lousy Brandon radio stations (i mean how many times can you really play Nickleback in one day???? note - this is my hotbutton issue). The only thing i'm concerned about is that i may start to enjoy it so much I will want to listen to it in my home and then what do i do? Makes me wonder whether quality on the Sirius might be a tad better.

I will have to check that out to see what it was that Home Depot had there. I'm unsure what sort of wire it was they had whether dual or quad shielded. Thanks for the tip Bren.

Well, when they built our house, they wired all the rooms with RG6, so I've never experienced R59, sorry man.

I might have some Cat5e cable if you want it.

Yeah, but it's probably a spool of crossover Cat5e ....

Sid,
You mention that you have to run an extra coax line for a satellite connection. If it's for a Directv satellite, you have XM radio from channel 800 to channel 899.

Pete - it's actually Bell Expressvu satellite. While they do have radio stations on there, they are regular radio stations so not what i'd deem as palatable. I wish they had XM or Sirius on the Sat that would make things much easier.

Bren - thank you very much for the offer, but i think i'm going to do it this weekend if i get a chance. Unfortunately i'm not planning a trip in to 'peg until Jun 10 for the Bright Eyes concert....of course i could drive to Winnipeg tonight to pick up the cable, but i think my $80+ gas bill would largely offset any savings from the free cable. Thanks anyways.

Spool of ... crossover ... Cat5e. Aaaaaarg, you're a bad person.

Just a quick note on XM and Sirius. We have both. XM in my car, and Sirius in our new minivan (came with it for 1 year).
Sound quality is about the same. Highly compressed. Not like MP3 compressed that still sounds pretty good for a digital recording, but noticably compressed. In our van, I only have bass/treble controls, and it always sounds "muddy and muffled". In my car, I have an aftermarket (nice) head unit ("radio") that I can control a LOT of the audio, way beyond just a graphic equilizer, and it sounds pretty good.

Still can tell it is compressed satelite radio, but not nearly as bad as the van.

The home kits are nice in that you just plug in the "tuner" and go. Some power, if not all, will be proprietary to some degree. Others may work on a universal power adapter where you have different connection options and can select voltage, etc.

I am not sure about hooking up satelite radio to a receiver at home. If you can really tweak the sound it will be OK, but still nothing great. I do know that Dolby or someone is working on new algorythms to help "expand" the compressed audio so that it doesn't sound so bad, but that is probably a year or so away before we will see that.

As for the real differences in the service providers, it is really just stations. I would say that Sirius has more "hard core" stations like Howard Stern, etc.

Be sure to look at satelite receivers with the options that you want. For example, my XM receiver has a 30 minute "memory" so I can go back 30 minutes of what I was listening to. The Sirius that is built in to our minivan does not have this feature. Also, the XM one I have shows a lot more information like station, song title, artist, etc. The built in one for Sirius only shows station.

Again, this is not a Sirius or XM thing, but a receiver options thing.

great thanks for the extra help Nick/Mark...i'm still having a hard time deciding between the two but i don't think it makes too much of a difference from the sounds of things. I think the different receivers i was looking at have a pretty comprehensive display, but none of them have replay (looks like about another $60+ dollars to get that option which i'm not too concerned about).

You haven't really observed any striking differences between the two setups Nick?

Bren, i certainly wouldn't describe Bright Eyes as emo, though he/they do perform with a lot of emotion. The two most recent albums were released at the same time, one a folk/country rock type and one an electronic rock. He has, to put it nicely, a unique voice - very wavery with a sort of insecurity to it. IMO very beautiful and also IMO he is one of the best songwriters today. He seems to have an incredible knack for writing songs that you can just close your eyes and picture. Tix, if still available, are pretty cheap, you might enjoy it.

Scott, at the very high frequencies in the gigahertz range that signals coming in from a satellite dish use, the loss in the coax can become significant, compared to in-house analog and even digital signals where the losses are insignificant at typical distances. Some suggest that RG6 be used for all lengths of runs from the dish, others will use RG59 up to about 50'. The RG59 would likely be fine for your needs.

What time are you coming in on the 10th? If you want to meet up before or go for a beer after, let me know... PM me for my phone # and stuff if that sounds like a good idea.

Bren R.

thanks John, i didn't get around to it this weekend but plan on going to Home Depot this evening to check out prices. I've determined i need ~22ft/run from dish to house interior so the difference in price for three of them, isn't going to be much more than $30. As a result, I will likely end up just going with the RG6 to be on the safe side.

Thanks for all your help everyone, if anyone else has anything to add on the sat radio subject, please feel free to do so.

Bren, i'll send you a pm