Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Sirius Satellite Radio


I have to say, I'm not at all impressed with Sirius Satellite Radio. I've never had the service, but have been drooling over the idea of so many digital-quality radio channels, with no (or minimal) advertisements, ever since the first announcements from the Sirius and XM companies. I was wishing I could bump into somebody that already had it, so I could play around with it and get a feel for it myself.

And then it happened. I was standing in a teeny tiny car rental booth in California as my business associate was arguing with the attendant about the rental car we had reserved, but was not showing up on the board outside (it was supposed to be ready for us to just hop in and drive away). In the already tight waiting room which could nold no more than the 4 adults with luggage who were there waiting in line at the time, there was a wooden stand in the corner of the room, poking me in the ribs. It was a demo station for Sirius radio! I had nothing better to do, so I played around with it. It was basically a car stereo with Sirius enabled on it, playing some jazz or something.

I don't like jazz, so I changed the channel. It took a long time to begin playing the music of the next channel, like 3 seconds or more. I'm a very impulsive person around technology, I thought it was a bad station so I hit "next", "next", "next", and didn't hear anything; I switched it back 4 stations (to the one it was originally on), and still nothing! Standing there confused, the sound of jazz reappeared in the room. Aha, I thought, it's just very slow to tune in. I changed the channel 1 step and waited... and waited. And voila, different music begin playing. I tried many channels, every single one took 3+ seconds to tune in. That's ridiculous.

Not only that, but the audio quality was horrible. It sounded severely compressed, like 64bit MP3, or something! I can barely stand 128kbps MP3's now, I prefer 256, but can stand 192 as well. This is lossy compressed digital audio - the quality's not going to be as good as a CD, but then a CD is pretty damn good, so that's OK as long as it sounds moderately good! This did not sound moderately good. It did not sound good to me at all.

I flipped thru many many stations, all of which were at the same lame quality. While doing so, I noticed something else; I could not find a single channel that I actually liked! I went completely around all the stations about 1 and a half times before my associate had straightened out the rental car issue, which I was not paying any attention to, and we had to leave. Some of the talk radio stations may have been interesting; I didn't really listen to those.

have always considered myself having a wide range of musical interest - I like pop, alternative, punk, some metal, trip-hop, dance/club/house, danceable latin music, hip-hop, and even some rap. But - it needs to be good stuff. Nothing sounded good to me on this thing.

This left me feeling sad. This service gets three thumbs down, from me. Now there's always a chance that I hit it at the wrong moment (maybe like air-wave radio stations, they play the better stuff around rush hour); maybe some idiot wired up this thing with no antenna, and it's a miracle it's getting any reception at all; I never did figure out where the antenna was; I didn't really see any wires going outside the waiting booth. But - this was their demonstration system! You're supposed to show off the best quality you can, to entice the audience! "If only people would try our system, they would want it," should be what the marketing people were thinking when they invested money in these keyosk-like receiver stations at the rental place.
Well, it didn't work for me. I'm not paying a monthly fee for a lame-ass music system that's disfunctional in every way I could think of. Great Idea, Bad Implementation - that about sums it up for me.

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