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Mr Peabody
05-31-2008, 05:42 PM
I searched briefly for an existing thread to post this but I didn't find anything that worked. So here we are.

My mom leased a new Chrysler Seebring and brought it over to show me. Yeah, nice, OK, let me check out the sound system. She wanted me to set her presets anyway. The stereo had sort of an old school look with the large knob on left and one on right, single CD, a mini AUX for mp3 or whatever and I noticed a SAT button. I asked my mom she didn't know anything about getting satelite. so I pushed it and hit seek, sure enough stations were coming in with all the text info. So I checked out a bunch of stations and preset some she'd like. What was interesting to me is this is the first time I could compare satelite, FM and CD all at once. I actually preferred the quality of FM over the Sirius and of course neither compared to CD. I was surprised at how bad the Sirius sounded. The sound did vary some from station to station but the sound generally seemed compressed and had what I can only describe as an AM ring to the midrange. That was the most annoying thing. I wonder if this is a character of all Sirius or if it was a weakness in the factory radio or perhaps where the car was sitting the signal was weak. I know if I was going to pay for music it's going to sound better than that. The system sounded pretty good for factory and most would probably like it because it had a big bass sound. I bumped the treble up a couple notches and still wasn't happy, the system needed some better tweets. The stereo did feature a midrange adjustment which I hadn't seen included on car or home equipment in a long time. I didn't want to alarm her and take the adjustments too far to the extreme but if I had to listen to it the treble would go up a couple more notches and the bass down a couple to try to achieve some balance in frequency. From my impression that still may have been difficult with the factory speakers.

hermanv
06-01-2008, 11:31 AM
I searched briefly for an existing thread to post this but I didn't find anything that worked. So here we are.

My mom leased a new Chrysler Seebring
<snip>
I wonder if this is a character of all Sirius or if it was a weakness in the factory radio or perhaps where the car was sitting the signal was weak.
<snip>
.Sirius is a digital stream as such there's is little or no tolerance for "weak" signals either there's enough data to decode or there isn't. Similar to digital cellphones when the signal gets weak the call is dropped, i.e silence..

So what you heard is either a receiver limitation in the car or excessive compression of data at the transmitter. I've only heard XM and Sirius in cars so I wrote off the quality to car radio limitations.

Has anyone heard the digital radio service over a good home system? At what, $10.95 a month for life, there seems little excuse for poor quality.