Joined
·
1,818 Posts
Ian is spot on with his comments about about XM as an audio source. What is happening here is the new tweets are revealing more of the deficiencies present in XM signaling than the OEM tweets could.
When Sirius and XM merged (a HUGE mistake for music fans IMO) compression was increased in favor of expanding the # channels while pretending to expand content diversity. By doing so, the resulting increase in compression ruined already questionable audio quality. XM might be good to expose oneself to music/content that would otherwise remain unknown, but as a source for listenable music it's marginal - at best.
Feeding a head unit with via an AUX port from any source introduces yet another limit to audio, but I don't mean to muck up the thread. For whatever reason, the Pioneer designed OEM RL system weakest link is the tweets. "Upgrading" them is a dual edged sword and has the potential to set a snow ball in motion. With that in mind, just know that XM isn't going to satisfy ones desire for good audio. Even spoken voice sounds "grainy" due to digital artifacts. XM knows this, but they don't care because most listeners don't care (or know).
When Sirius and XM merged (a HUGE mistake for music fans IMO) compression was increased in favor of expanding the # channels while pretending to expand content diversity. By doing so, the resulting increase in compression ruined already questionable audio quality. XM might be good to expose oneself to music/content that would otherwise remain unknown, but as a source for listenable music it's marginal - at best.
Feeding a head unit with via an AUX port from any source introduces yet another limit to audio, but I don't mean to muck up the thread. For whatever reason, the Pioneer designed OEM RL system weakest link is the tweets. "Upgrading" them is a dual edged sword and has the potential to set a snow ball in motion. With that in mind, just know that XM isn't going to satisfy ones desire for good audio. Even spoken voice sounds "grainy" due to digital artifacts. XM knows this, but they don't care because most listeners don't care (or know).