Sirius listening on vintage radio

[jr_tech]

Originally Posted by AUdubon5425

I have a basic Sirius "In-V" receiver/decoder and always thought most of the audio sounded heavily compressed.

Are you talking about audio compression (reduced dynamic range) or bit rate reduction (watery sounds like a low bit-rate MP3) , or both effects?

jr

[sidbartos]

Both Sirius and XM both use heavy compression. This is a huge complaint over at the xmfan.com forums. Most agree that XM/Sirius sound quality is worse than FM. (I find this to be true). I think they forbid sound quality complaint threads on the forum because it was getting so out of hand. The worst part is that they carry a few clearchannel channels (through some bs legal deal years ago) and they have the best audio quality out of any stations. The purposely give the talk channels lower quality and quality can vary between the music channels. Even with the less than perfect sound quality, I would rather have a huge music selection and no commercials than listen to FM during my commute every day.
That Ramsey unit doesn't look like a bad deal for $30. I used to listen to my XM receiver through FM on my German set but it would be nice to use it for my AM only Zenith.

[darklife]

Originally Posted by sidbartos

Both Sirius and XM both use heavy compression.

In a way this can be a good thing though when rebroadcasting it around the house on AM since it would push the little transmitter to full modulation allowing it to be received much farther away. As with large AM radio stations they want to compress their audio to sound "louder" and it does help their range a bit.
Also you won't have to worry about the audio clipping and distorting on the tiny AM transmitter because Sirius already does the job of compression and peak limiting for you
On the other hand there is a lot to be said for audio dynamics. Something that seems to be a lost art today