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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts

I've been subscribing for about a decade and I haven't experienced this. Possibly something in the tech stack here has improved.

> there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify

It's easier and cheaper to get satellite radio in a moving car than reliable Internet. You can save music offline (although I find a USB stick a much easier way of doing that than a smartphone with an app with offline storage, but then again most of the music I listen to is at least a couple of decades old), but you can't get live broadcasts of things like sports events or concerts.

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> I've been subscribing for about a decade and I haven't experienced this. Possibly something in the tech stack here has improved.

I've listened to Sirius in several environments across many years, spanning most of its existence. In just about every case, I found the audio quality to be intolerably terrible. This is in multiple cars in different years. Curiously, I've noticed a strain of people that claim that it sounds good. Sometimes, I've been in the same car with them at the same time, listening to the same thing. I can't account for it. I'm generally not an audio snob, but satellite radio sounds so bad, I can't stand it at all. I'd rather have silence.

I'm not sure the underlying reason for this, but I guess some people just hear differently.

> I've noticed a strain of people that claim that it sounds good.

I would say it sounds good, exactly; I can notice a difference between it and, say, listening to a high quality recording from a USB stick. But I wouldn't say it's intolerably terrible, either. Is it that you literally can't hear music, just noise? Or is it that you can hear music, but with other noise overlaid on top of it?

I can hear the music. There's some noise on top, but also the high frequency components seem to be pretty scrambled and mostly missing. Depending on the channel.

Hm, weird. That's not something I've experienced.

I think it depends on the channel too. I've read the low number channels get more bandwidth and the channels above 300 are a newer more efficient codec that not all radios support.

I've also read the Sirius version is worse than the XM version. Yes, they merged many years ago but they still run two incompatible systems. Ford was still installing Sirius until 2021.

> I've also read the Sirius version is worse than the XM version.

I wasn't aware of this. This would explain why I am not seeing the sound quality issues that other people in this discussion are describing; my latest vehicle has XM.

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