Grinch80

XM sounds muffled, all low/mid range, no high end. Sounds like it cuts out at 12-14 kHz. Under the same EQ settings, all other inputs sound fine.

Any ideas?

wasupdog

iTrader: (2)

yea, this is the "problems and fixes" sub-forum and yea, this is a problem. no, there is no fix other than adjusting the eq on the stereo unit.

Grinch80

That's clear enough, thanks. I'm not all that impressed with XM programming (except for O&A), and with the crappy sound, it's a no-brainer for me not to continue my 3 month promo.

KeithL

Welcome to XM, I had Sirius for a while and found their sound quality to be somewhat better, cleaner and clearer, unfortunatley their signal sucked and I woudl get drop out all the time.

dampfnudel

It's definitely not worth the "regular" price. Maybe HD radio will be better.

Grinch80

You guys have probably been over this already, but...

I did some digging and it appears XM is severly bandwidth limited. Quantity over quality I suppose.

Since XM doesn't publish its bitrates, most folks are speculating 48-96 kbps per channel (good enough for spoken broadcasts, certainly not for music). And I don't care how good the compression is at these bitrates.

So I tested with my iPod over AUX. Even 128 kbps sounded a tad muffled, whereas 192 kbps sounded great. Both of my tests employed AAC; no idea what compression XM uses.

All subjective of course, but I still can't get over how bad XM actually sounds. No wonder why its merging to stay alive...if the fidelity was high, you'd have audiophiles flocking to pay $13/month.

I'm just glad, as a new owner, that it's not my TL at fault.

Grinch80

P.S. I could not tell a difference between 192 AAC and lossless with the stock TL stereo. Which is good since I only have 8GB storage (less actually) with my nano.