The General said:
I have had XM since getting my TL over a year ago. I love it! What makes Sirius better than XM...in your opinion?
Oh boy, you asked for it. Here's my trademarked Satellite Radio Rant:
I had Sirius in my previous vehicle for about a year. I was overjoyed with it, it had eveything I wanted... Good sound quality, Very good channel line-up, Quirky DJs and quite a bit of other odds and ends that you'd really feel if they were missing.
Then I moved and got the Acura. I was set on the Acura because of the vastly superior Navi and since I'm new to the whole region I figured that'd be pretty much a must-have. I was disappointed that the Honda only used XM and had no option for Sirius (unlike Audi which offers an option of either for the same price). But because of the overall quality of the car, I pushed ahead with the purchase.
If there had been no free trial I honestly wouldn't have even activated the XM because I had already been happy with Sirius and didn't want the change in experience. But obviously I wasn't about to pass up the free trial and gave it a shot. So activated it went.
Right away I saw glancing at the line-up card that the selection was noticeably worse. In some genres, there simply wasn't as many channels as Sirius (i.e. Electronic/Dance). In others, the sub-genres didn't exactly have their own channels and were mixed in with other different sub-genres that created a sort of mish-mash channel that I only liked half of the songs and hated the other half (i.e. Rock). Unlike my prized Sirius, which has fairly clearly defined channels for most popular sub-genres. Electronic/Dance music is sorted out into around 5-6 channels on Sirius as opposed to around 2-3 on XM.
The DJs don't even compare either. While it's up to you whether or not you like a DJ that's wacky and kind of out there, you must admit it's nice to have DJs with defined personalities. DJs on Sirius (at least on the channels I listened) had their own personality and way of doing what they do, so much so that their names will inevitably stick in your head. XM, on the other hand, sounds more like a college radio station with lots of monotone dronings about this and that. No personality. No flare. You're lucky to keep from falling asleep between songs.
This next part will come into play next year... Premium services. XM has the broadcast-radio-axed pair of Opie and Anthony and also, Playboy radio. Opie and Anthony, from what I understood, don't have a show on XM but more of a channel where they broadcast a live show during the weekdays and run replays during all the other time. Now, that's all fine and dandy but would you pay an extra $1.95 per month for this? Yes, it's not included in the $9.95 per month fee. The notion of premium radio stations is just really silly to me. Now, $1.95 isn't a whole lot of money but when you compare it to the rest of the XM line-up... is it really worth an additional 20% of the regular monthly fee for one more channel? I suppose if you're a fan, it doesn't matter. But to me, who used to listen to their show but am not by any means obsessed with them, it simply isn't worth it.
Now, when Stern comes to Sirius on Jan 1 I have to believe that they wouldn't do this premium channel garbage. The draw of saying you can listen to Stern at no extra charge would no doubt draw many many many extra people to the service.
Now, a word on hardware. I had the Sirius PNP-2 unit. Which is a sizeable box but has a nice and large display for easy viewing and is detachable so it can interface with a home system or another car. You pay the subscription on the unit, not the docking hardware so you can move it from place to place and only have one sub.
XM has a far better set-up in terms of integration. XM-ready aftermarket radios generally can control the sat. radio right from the controls with no extra "control box". You'll be hard pressed to find a Sirius-ready radio. Sirius mostly goes for the additional "box" setup and has you pipe it to your radio either via Aux-In or FM modulator. Factory Sirius/XM setups are tight all around but you're at the mercy of your chosen make of automobile.
And I haven't even touched on the thing that really matters yet... sound quality. If you're somewhat of an audiophile like myself or am just plain attentive, you will be able to tell the difference between Sirius and XM instantly. While I don't have the exact technical specs, I can tell you by comparison to the MP3 format (as far as I know both XM and Sirius are just mp3 streams anyway). Sirius sounds very decent. By no means is it CD quality but it's fairly close and will definately do considering the massive selection Sirius presents.
I'd liken Sirius to about a 128kbps MP3 file. In Rock music, you will notice slight distortion on hard cymbal crashes. Vocals are generally very clean. Upon the first 30 seconds of listening to XM I noticed the drastically lower quality sound. I'd liken XM to around a 96kpbs MP3. For the technically uninclined, this is a big difference. At 96kbps, most percussion instruments have noticeable distortion and vocals start to noticably distort at low levels (i.e. soft speaking/whispering). In short, listen to radio in a metal garbage can and you'll have an idea about what XM sounds like.
But finally, the single biggest annoyance about XM that makes me want to pull my hair because it could've so easily been rectified in the design process and there really is no technical reason for it is... title length.
First, let me say, Sirius handled this area beautifully. All the Sirius gear has a mono lcd display that can do graphics fairly well. I don't know the exact res but it is not just an alpha-numeric display like XM. Sirius can display both long song names and long artist names. I think the limit is somewhere around 60 characters each. The equipment has a few different fonts you can select from. At standard font size, it can display around 20 characters wide. If the artist or song name is longer than that, it will go into a smaller font which can do around 40 characters and if that isn't enough it will scroll the name a few times. (These figures are out of my head, I don't know what the exact limits are but I don't need to know because of how dismally XM performs in this area....)
I have no idea who would make the call for something like this but somebody somewhere at XM decided that all XM equipment will be able to display X characters and that rather than just scroll the title, all titles should just be truncated at X characters. From observation (again, I haven't read any specific numbers from anywhere), X is about 12 characters. Yes, just twelve characters. I'd say around 80% of all music has either a longer artist name or longer song title than that. So you end up with these frankenstein truncated names. For example, the Saliva song "Survival of the Sickest" becomes "Survival Sic". What kind of amatuer crap is that? This is the single most thing that disgusted me with XM.
There is no technical reason for not having scrolling titles when they were doing the design work. Who knows if they'll ever fix the issue. I doubt it. Alphanumeric displays on XMs external control boxes could've just scrolled the song. On our Navis, long titles would've display beautifully on the screen. Instead we're left with a barely descriptive field spanning about 1/3 of our Navi screen.
So, for all of those reason above, I spit on XM. My ideal solution would be a kit that would allow us to swap the XM reciever and antenna with one for Sirius. As far as I know, the radio controls are part of the Navi disc and can be upgraded just by upgrading the software on the Navi disc. I'm dreaming obviously and will probably have to settle with an Aux-In and external Sirius box set-up. The Sirius Sportster looks like a promising choice as it's much smaller than the previous generation of Sirius gear like the PNP-2 and looks like it can fit in that small compartment below the Navi.
In any case, those are my thoughts, hope you enjoyed them.
