blacktints

I am thinking of buying the one year subscibtion, but the digital newscasting sucks, is this always going to be the case?

Alin10123

Digital newscasting? huh?

Ozzman

I had noticed that baseball broadcasts seem to sound like they have a slight echo or something. I got used to it, but definately not as good as listening to the same game on the local am broadcast. Just FYI, I have a 2004 so the XM was aftermarket, but it is hard-wired in with the SHOND3 thingy. Music sounds good though.

J.A.S.

Yes, I have an '06 an XM can sound sort of electronic, especially baseball. Music has been decent though. I love the programming of XM; you can listen to many things not found on conventional radio. But in terms of sound quality, I rate CDs as the best, followed by regular FM, followed by XM.

Brandon24pdx

I think the SQ of XM radio stinks compared to CD's. Sounds like low bitrate MP3 files.

04rob

I had Sirius and it was the same way. I always thought a decent FM signal sounded way better. Even the music stations.

Alin10123

That's exactly what XM is. It's not "true" CD quality. They are basically playing MP3's form a huge database on all of the stations. That's why it sounds like that. But MP3's still sound better than FM even.

Alin10123

This may answer the question about news casts and sports, a lot of the XM channels dont really have a direct link to the sports or news stations. What they do is have contracts with the stations and then they take the feed from the FM broadcast and they feed it through their XM stuff. That's why it sounds like that.

jiggaman

i dont agree that it sounds better than FM, i think a strong signal FM channel sounds better.

vidgamer

The problem with FM is that a "strong signal" usually is an overboosted and volume-compressed one, and that creates problems of it's own... but yeah, I still prefer FM over XM for pure sound quality. That aside, you get XM for the music and variety. I really love the selections, and like being able to see the names of songs & bands. Too bad the sound isn't better. (I wish they could launch another satellite or something. )

All you have to do is listen to some over-compressed MP3s, particularly in the high frequencies such as cymbals and hi-hat, and you'll hear that weird distorted sound in XM. Sigh.

But as I read recently on a home theater site about XM, "Enjoy the music!"

amg212

In order to maximize the number of channels XM can offer, it tries to optimize its use of bandwidth giving the higher bitrates to channels that need it (music) and giving less to news channels. The lowest bitrates are used on the traffic channels where the concern isn't sound quality, just getting out the information.

There are tons of discussions about this on www.xmfan.com and www.xm411.com

vidgamer

Too bad that the music channels still don't sound that great. Oh well, at least it has variety going for it!