I really like my music. At home I have my computer piping stuff out, I always have a CD in the car going, and at work we have Dish Network playing Sirius Satellite Radio playing. So this past Christmas (2006) I decided to try Sirius out personally.
Nothing adds to the heat and traffic frustrations while driving like long, louder than life radio commercial breaks. With all the options of music I’ve been listening to, you just don’t realize how much you hate them until your sister calls “Switch” and so you accordingly trade vehicles and later realize there’s no CD in her Jeep stereo.
So Sirius was going good at work. No commercials, plenty of music channels to choose from, and there was even a pretty hard rock Christian station that I couldn’t even get away with playing at work for fear of the old people’s wrath.
So I asked for it for Christmas and got a good home/car unit.
Another part of my decision came from me finding out that my Xterra’s stereo could be modded for an auxiliary input (Install Write Up). That meant I could just jack in my satellite radio straight into the deck instead bringing it in via radio transmitter. Those things not only suck with sound quality, but don’t fare well in larger cities and you’d end up having to fiddle with switching stations.
So anyway, I found a good place for the unit to mount in the Xterra, did my aux-in mod, and ran all the wires out of sight. I also figured out how to set up the antenna in my home, running the wires into my room stereo’s aux.
Well, I had some issues. The first thing I noticed was the sound quality. Guess I should have done some research, but I was used to the nice uninterrupted stereo sound quality of the Dish at work. The Sirius I was catching was comparable to a clean AM station- nice and mono. I also found that the volume was to be lacking. Plenty of treble could be heard but the bass would go bye-bye. You’d think this would be an okay price to pay now that commercials would be a thing of the past, but I gotta tell you, the quality borderlines on embarrassing. There’s no point riding around with the windows down. The wind would shred the sound into nothing and even if not, Korn doesn’t really have the same effect coming out of what sounds to be one small tweeter.
Now I would immediately assume what you may be at this point, the problem lies within the new aux-in set up, but I tried other music players through the same port. My GPS for instance will play MP3’s all day long, and when attached to my X deck will come through like a champ bringing the whole spectrum of sound through the speakers so I feel confident isolating the problem to the Sirius signal.
Okay, so let's get past that. Still no commercials, still good stations… but wait. 2 months into my contract they kill the station I went exclusively with Sirius for: my scary Christian music station. Oh there’s still the KLOVE version that just embarrasses self respecting Christians everywhere with their “If you’re feeling down, why not look up,” taglines. I tell ya, I’d rather go to heaven with my eyes lit up and my ears ringing than asleep at the wheel.
So if you haven’t figured out yet, I’ll be letting my contract run out with Sirius unless they get some better programming. At home it’s not too bad. You still have to channel surf to stay out of the fruity trendy stuff, but whatever. At home I’ll be sticking with RadioU.com for my listening pleasure (shameless plug, but no commercials either), and CD’s/MP3’s in the Xterra until RadioU comes here.
I wouldn’t trade my Aux-In mod out though, so something good did come out of it. So thanks for that and so long 60 worthless channels of AM quality smelly donkey crap splash (sorry I wanted to end big).