WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has approved Sirius Satellite Radio's $5 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio.

The merger was approved despite opposition from consumer groups and an intense lobbying campaign by the land-based radio industry.

Regulators said the merger is not likely to substantially hurt competition or consumers(emphasis added).

Yeah, right. I guess we'll soon see the end of the $77 offer.

LL

 

Indeed.

My underdstanding is that XM or Sirius receivers are capable of either signal, provided the transmissions are modified for the receivers. So perhaps we will be able to have both services before they are fully integrated as one product.

Honda has a stake in XM ownership, so it will be interesting to see if this improves AcuraLink telematics.

 

OTOH, some sources are already saying that since neither receiver can accept both signals, consumers will have to buy new equipment!

How the heck will they handle that with OEM-installed systems?

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I will reiterate.

What I have read, the receiver can receive either signal. But not both, simulataneously. The change would need be from the transmission source to 'talk' to the appropriate receiver.

Hence, during the interim a dual signal from each source (XM and Sirius) could, theoretically accomodate both XM and Sirius receivers. But I would not expect plural signals to be maintained, eventually one source would be phased out and the other source would soldier on.

 

it would be nice if they took the extra available bandwidth and improved sound quality.....its rather poor compared even to FM radio. That is unlikely to occur though....but it would be nice.

 

Some more details for the technogeeks (like me!) can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM/Sirius_merger

Even though each receiver operates at S band and can "see the signals from the other system, it can't decode or decompress it because of the different encoding/compression schemes used by the two companies. Also, the fact that Sirius operates in an elliptical orbit introduces Doppler effects to the carrier frequency, which the receiver has to compensate for prior to demodulating the received signal; XM is in a geostationary orbit and does not have this issue. The Wiki section about a dual mode receiver is interesting, but the only thing that will save those of us with an XM or Sirius receiver already installed is if the merged companies maintain the two existing formats for backward compatibility or if the current receivers can somehow be upgraded via firmware to accept a new unified compression/encoding scheme and the Doppler-slewed carrier from the Sirius satellites.

 

I was speaking to a friend of mine who is an audio professional regarding the 2 systems and he has both in a LS430 with the ML system. This guy has also been writing reviews and technical papers for years for numerous magazines and trade papers so I respect his opinion.
He prefers the Sirius for choice but technically it doesn't sound as good as XM.
Maybe Sirius will win then because most people on this forum have more questions about their IPOD interface than their DVD-Audio. Even though the IPOD is giving you a compressed version of a CD and the DVD is as good as you can record.

 

I don't know what the specific compression scheme that is used by either XM or Sirius, but my ears tell me that XM is probably no better than the low end of MP3 compression (ie, 128k) and is distinctly bandlimited-the sonic difference between XM compared even to regular FM radio is noticeable (in a negative way) on my Denon/Rotel/Dynaudio 7.1 home theater system, and almost any CD sounds significantly better than XM. I used XM for the convenience, the large selection of content and the lack of commercials in my RL, but now that my $77 subscription has expired, I switched to my growing collection of DTS and DVD-audio disks (get 'em while you can!)-sonic nirvana reigns once again in the RL cockpit. Unless the XM/Sirius merge refocuses on improving audio quality, this merger is a "don't care" for me.