Didnt they advertise cd quality sound back in the day when they were firsting coming out?

 

Yes they did. They lied
We are all so easily satisfied with low quality garbage these days. XM just followed the trend to the bottom of the sound quality charts that began with MP3s and continues today with the silly ipod madness.
Sound quality was on an upswing in general within the digital world when MP3s and the dreaded compression from Hades entered the scene. It is all about convenience's. One convenience of broadcast/transfer and one of the larger quantity of material that one can carry/move.

I'll admit that some of these compression schemes have gotten better and that in a moving vehicle the ambient noise masks a lot of imperfections. Still When a CD sounds a LOT better than XM, which touts it is "CD quality", then we do still have ears and know, unfortunately that XM lies.........

And honestly, Red Book CD DOES leave a lot to be desired as well. It is a digital encoding/decoding scheme written over twenty five years ago. SACD and DVD Audio have come and shown us where consumer digital audio can go, but alas, few of us will ever enjoy them.
For most of us CD quality was/is good enough and so are ipods and their output. We vote with our dollars and have rejected better sound in favor of quantity .

Just the facts, though it makes this elitist sad

 

I'm totally with you on this, Harpozep. I've got SACD/DVDAudio at home too and it's pretty amazing. I also mourn what seems to be the acceptance of inferior audio these days. At least iTunes is starting to offer higher quality music- it's a step in the right direction. And XM's effort to upgrade is very welcome. But I suspect that the younger generation doesn't know or care about the difference and it may slip away. In defense of the iPod: it's obviously just a storage device so I often rip playlists at home at higher resolution. At the expense of file size, of course, but how much music do I really need to have with me at all times?

 

Glad to meet another SACD/DVDA convert I am constantly floored by Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow in 5.1 SACD. Like I'm in the studio with George Martin

I'm coming to understand the ipod being used as a playback device for not just the heavily compressed/dead pop music most people have on it. I have found a portable player that decodes uncompressed FLAC files like I download from the dimeadozen bittorent site.

This is the device I'd likely get or a newer version if one exists. Only so much time in the world to rip and transcode things, so I'd rather just transfer my FLACs as is than create lossy versions. Like you say, how much music do you really need with you anyway. To heck with space
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...outThisProduct

 

There is someone over on XMFan that has a CTS-V with the Bose speaker system that says XM sound like crap, but FM and CD sound fine.

Do you have the navigation system in the Corvette?

It's likely an issue with the head unit.

 

I have Sirius. The sound quality is pretty bad compared to Vinyl. CD's are not bad but the DVD is by far the best digital playback quality.

I use the Sirius unit in my garage. I hook up the home kit to a set of Logitech Z5300 powered speakers. Now I have garage tunes.

The only reason I actually have Sirius is because I cant stand radio commercials! They play a couple of tunes and then have commercials for the next half hour. Drives me nuts.

Also alot of the stations here that had good music have either turned to country (not bad music but just not for me) or spanish.

 

I agree...terrestrial radio is tiresome. Around here I swear the classic rock station only has 20 CDs they play, in between 20 commercials.

I'm turning into an XM addict. I bought my 4th XM radio yesterday and now have an antenna repeater setup in the house so I can use separate radios on each floor to listen to different channels.

 

yep, his vette came with the nav system too, and onstar (which he hasn't even turned on yet) it's a shame how bad his xm sounds, also with the vette having their antenna in the passenger side view mirror, it goes in and out a lot more, we live in the tenn mountains with lots of trees, and it's extremely annoying, we both have dodge rams with sirius and don't have that problem at all! I want satellite gosh doggit! now!!! heehee

 

any updates on if xm and sirius are merging? I still dont' have either in my hhr and hubby's vette still sounds poor! I want my satellite radio!

 

No news yet. I wouldn't count on it...lot's of Gov't types do not want it to happen.

But even if they do merge, you would need to buy new radios to get their proposed a la carte options.