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Digital Home talks to Sirius XM about the merger

6K views 21 replies 12 participants last post by  hugh 
#1 ·
#3 ·
No. I asked about this. Apparently, sound quality is not an issue with customers. Sirius asks its customers why they are leaving and sound quality is not even in the top five reasons.

He was genuinely surprised when I asked the question.
 
#5 ·
My car is noisy enough that I wouldn't notice an improvement in quality. Also the music I listen to, older pop and rock, was not exactly produced with hi-fi quality in the first place.

The business about the Best of channels. Would anyone in the CRTC or wherever notice if we just got the US 'Best of' channels or does someone somewhere actually monitor the stuff?
 
#6 ·
I doubt anyone in the CRTC would monitor but terrestrial competitors and consumers would.
 
#8 ·
Didn't ask but they did say the primary reason was a reduction in driving.

Most people listen in the car. When they stop being in the car a lot they can't rationalize the monthly cost.
 
#11 ·
I only put about 7000kms per year on the truck and don't have any issue with paying for Sirius. I guess it could be because we only have two stations here. A top 40 and a Country station. As for the sound quality, I have a an Alpine system in the truck and I find the quality is just fine. It's FM basicly, what do you expect? Funny people have no problem spending $5 for a coffee that lasts 5 minutes put complain about $6 a month. Go figure.
 
#12 ·
It's funny how people like to rip on 128kbps MP3s as being "low quality", yet Sirius/XM don't get scolded when their best bitrate is half that of these "low quality" MP3s.

Its similar to another group that loves "high quality vinyl records" and somehow believe that they sound better than 128kbps MP3s, even though the THD for vinyl is demonstrably worse than MP3s.

I don't think I'll ever subscribe the Sirius or XM because I have a smartphone, and I'm not amused by Howard Stern's "base humor".
 
#14 ·
I find the Sirius SQ to be awful. I can only listen to it for so long before my ears begin to hurt from the compression.

If I was to unsubscribe, SQ would be my primary reason.

What I wish they would do is offer new dual-tuner radios. Ones that pick up Sirius and XM signals.

Move all the talk/sports crap to one and put all the music on the other. That way they can increase the bandwidth available for music and improve the SQ.

But it sounds like that won't be happening.
 
#15 ·
What I wish they would do is offer new dual-tuner radios. Ones that pick up Sirius and XM signals
As noted in the link, coming in the holiday season.
 
#16 ·
In the past, I have called the SiriusXM merger anti-competitive because it created a Satellite radio monopoly which could lead to higher prices and Al took me to task during our conversation.
Perspective from south of your border.

You can bet that price increases will happen!

I consider myself to be a "charter" subscriber to XM (US) as I subscribed the very first day the service was offered in the northern tier of the US way back in November of 2001. I doubt they have many subscribers who've been around longer than I.

Since the merger in '08 for the US side of the services, I've lost included online access (they want extra for it now) and my quarterly bill has gone from under $60/quarter for two receivers to almost $75/quarter thanks to a new "royalty fee". Additionally, they now levy a $15 fee for swapping a radio out, a service which used to be self-service and free.

Later this year, the three year moratorium against price increases that was a mandate for merger approval expires and I fully expect yet another price increase or service reduction to follow immediately.


Subscribers up north should be prepared for eventual sticker shock.
 
#17 ·
Sirius and XM don't use MP3. It's entirely possible that their 64 kbps is equivalent in quality to MP3 at 128 kbps, especially if they use AAC or AAC+.

(Note that I'm actually pretty unhappy with Sirius' audio quality, even in our car, but you can't just compare bits to bits.)
 
#18 ·
Sirius and XM don't use MP3. It's entirely possible that their 64 kbps is equivalent in quality to MP3 at 128 kbps, especially if they use AAC or AAC+.
To date there is no such thing as an audio codec that compares favorably to 128kbps MP3 when running at very low bitrates like 64kbps or less. So, unless SiriusXM came up with a world beating audio codec a decade ago and the rest of the world never learned about it, I'd say that hypothesis is on very shaky ground.
 
#19 ·
As it turns out, I work for a company (Mozilla, the makers of Firefox) who's helping make that next generation of codec (Opus, formerly known as CELT), and all the listening tests these days have been on ~64 kbps AAC and better (spoiler: Opus wins ;) ).

While I agree that it seems unlikely that Sirius or XM came up with something better than 128 kbps MP3 10 years ago independently, if they're just using AAC, I'd say their job was done for them.
 
#22 ·
Based on what I've been told, I would agree with Hoserhead.

Corus switched to AAC three years ago because they found the sound quality so superior. They said they could get the same quality at a third the bandwidth.
 
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