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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.