Blame the Federal Censorship Corporation!
Satellite radio is more than capable of some pretty good sound quality. My old Sony A/V Receiver had XM built in and could do Neural 5.1 decoding. While I would never normally listen to Fine Tuning or XM Pops, those two channels sounded incredible and could rival Dolby 5.1. Too bad XM never expanded their XMHD stuff. Even if you had hardware that wasn’t able of doing Neural, due to the amount of bandwidth these channels were given, they were still at least CD quality and much better then FM radio.
I don’t put the blame of the sound quality issues on XM, Sirius or now Sirius XM. Yes, bandwidth is wasted and used inefficiently, but I put the blunt of the blame on the FCC. Those commies never wanted satellite radio to exist. They wanted to protect their terrestrial buddies and the NAB. So they intentionally limited the amount of bandwidth they licensed for SDARS use. And to add insult to injury XM needed to seek investment from those asshats at Clear Channel so the FCC won in two ways. Not only did they limit SDARS bandwidth to restrict sound quality, but now, while all terrestrial radio is evil, the most evil of them all has a presence in the spectrum. The FCC didn’t want satellite radio to exist, and despite all the hurtles faced they launched and did pretty well, and now the FCC has to do everything in their power to see it brought down so the freedom is speech over the airwaves is restricted like they want it to be.
I have Sirius built into my new home theater receiver and listen to that, I also have Shoutcast built in, and both my TV and blu ray player do Pandora and Slacker. In my personal car I have my old XM Roady XT hooked up and at work I stream Sirius XM and Pandora. To hell with all terrestrial broadcasters! To hell with the FCC! To hell with them all, may they all burn and rot!
Which is one reason why they probably got rid of it.
I do agree with the general consensus. Since Sirius bought XM both have gone downhill, XM more so. Stations being removed, XM stations being replaced by poorer quality Sirius stations, music library diminishing from those stations that were kept, more DJ chatter (XM had no DJs at all on most stations), removal of ground repeaters (worse reception and affects XM more), poorer quality equipment, additional charges (on-line listening used to be free and included with a subscription), and price increases
I'm a little late to chiming in on this topic, but I couldn't agree more. I began my XM subscription in November 2001 (actually had it installed Thanksgiving weekend at Best Buy). I enjoyed the wide variety of music without the chatter that you got on terrestrial stations. Once the merger occurred, the quality of the product has decreased. I just want to listen to music and not have a DJ talk about something that has no bearing on the piece of music just played.
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