X920BT - Sirius Interface & other thoughts

[Bill Dunn]

Just installed the X920BT in wife's car along with the Sirius satellite receiver & interconnect. Had planned to go Eclipse until they decided to exit the market.

 

Overall, the X920 is a great unit and voice control of nav & iPhone functions seems to work extremely well. But the Sirius radio interface is terrible and extremely crippled. Pre-Sets don't show any channel info at all as compared to the XM interface which is very robust with detailed information about the channel pre-set.

 

Very disappointed in the lack of information for pre-sets. You better have a very good memory to remember what you programmed in what pre-set. An e-mail to Pioneer with an inquiry as to plans to improve the interface was answered with an "I'm sorry, this is normal for the Sirius interface and there are no plans to update/improve the interface."

 

Clearly, the data is already there since you can scroll through the display button on the main Sirius page. Gee, at least let us config the buttons with the AVIC feed software and name them.

 

This is my first experience with these Pioneer units after months of research.

[PaisanNYC]

If you had done the research, then you would have seen that the Sirius interface has always sucked for years. XM used to be superior until Mel bought them out.

[BondR32]

That was my biggest complaint with my D3.

How is the XM interface. I want this radio but don't want to deal with that.

[RockTheDrums429]

i have the x920 and i was researching all the info and stats before i bought it. i had XM back from 2003-2005 and then sirius for 2008 (got a free year when i bought my truck). i was going to buy the sirius adapter and interface but according to everyone on these boards, sirius looks terrible on pioneer radios. they couldnt have been more accurate.

 

i decided on XM and wow....i couldnt imagine using sirius. in the instruction manual, they have pics of both and with all that gorgeous real estate on such a big 6.1 inch screen, to not use it properly is just a shame. XM displays EVERYTHING you would want....the channel #, name, song artist and song title...all at once. no need to hit multiple buttons to see one piece of info at a time.

 

as an extra added bonus, i found that that XM is just superior to sirius. if you like howard and other kinds of talk radio, well then yea, sirius is def for you. but as far as music goes, XM has far greater variety, content and selection. im also a huge baseball fan, so the MLB games even further made my choice the right one. i couldnt be happier....and it just looks GREAT on the radio screen.

 

hope that helps!

[Bill Dunn]

Thanks for your reply. Like a previous poster pointed out, I guess I didn't do enough research. Pretty disappointing though for a high-end unit!

 

Maybe Pioneer is in cahoots with the the XM folks. Seems odd that all the info is available and displayed with the XM receiver but not the Sirius receiver - even though all the Sirius data is sent to the head unit.

 

I'm going to pass on the Z series for the other car since Sirius display is crippled. I've been a Sirius subscriber for over 5 years and enjoy their programming so don't plan to change and pay extra for the Sirius channels I listen to most often.

 

Live and learn.

 

Bill

[kitzi]

Does the interface save the Sirius information you select to view after power down? IE, if I select to display Artist does it default to Artist everytime or does it default to channel # and force me to change it each time?