Pioneer XM sound Q Vs .DEI Sirius.

[Gordyzero]

Has anyone else noticed just how terrible XM sounds when compared to Sirius. I have both Tuner's added to my F90bt. I couldn't believe just how horrible and compressed XM sound's. The only reason I added the XM tuner is I wanted the song and artist title on the display at the same time. DEI makes the Sirius tuner. And anyone familiar with DEI would probably agree they should have never left the car alarm market. So I purchased the Pioneer GEX 920 XM tuner with no worries. I was so let down with it's performance. It sounds like total garbage, only 7 channels actually have there own station logo. While the rest of the channels offer only a image of a satellite. WOW ! I have seen the thread here to update the station logo, does anyone else agree it should just work right out of the box? This is my first and LAST XM product. The DEI screen is completely stupid. It's either song, or artist or channel, one at a time. With enough room left in the" Gray box" area for 2 more lines of script. While just above that ,the Larger Sirius logo is right on top of an even smaller and identical Sirius logo that never changes. The larger of the two Sirius logos, that NEVER CHANGES is the box that XM offers just a few channels their own station logo in. But just a few. What ever happened to car audio?

[SuperH]

Sirius XM's XM utilizes HE-AAC (aacPlus) V1 CBR at 32kbps for most of their channels. They are optimized with Neural Audio branded processors to process for dynamics, stereo image, and to avoid CODEC artifacts. Neural Audio's goal is to maintain the source as close to the original as possible, albeit you have some irregularities at such a low bitrate with HE-AAC.

 

Sirius XM's Sirius utilizes ePAC varying VBR (0kbps - 60kbps, switched in 10kbps blocks) for most of their channels. They average around 30kbps. They are processed with Orban DAB-6200 audio processors to process for dynamics and the stereo image.

 

What you prefer in sound quality depends on what you're sensitive to. For me, I prefer the sound quality of XM because the audio has more dynamism, and the high frequency range isn't watery like on Sirius. Plus, the audio doesn't pump with the processing on loud noises. Some people are more sensitive to the SBR (Spectral Band Replication) noise generation algorithm utilized to replicate the high frequencies in the HE-AAC plus CODEC which XM uses. You are likely in that group, as am I. However, I am more sensitive to volume being "fluttered" up and down in rapid succession, which is a methodology utilized in traditional dynamics processing like on the Sirius side.

 

...My two cents.