SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Questions for SiriusXM customers:

I just came back from a road trip, and a motel gave me a 3 month trial. We started listening to the '50s station.

1) The sound was lousy. The sound on the '60s channel was worse. On some songs we could hear the lyrics; on others all we could distinguish were the instruments. Lots of bass, but not much midrange. Is that your experience?

2) Over 2 days on the road, we heard a number of songs that were hits, but not by the original artists. Is that common? Do they play the original hits more often than covers?

3) They played a lot of relatively unknown songs by some top artists, songs that are unknown for good reasons. Again, do they play hits? They did pretty well with Chuck berry, but their selection from, say, Buddy Holly and Little Richard were truly some of their worst stuff.

Thanks.

1) The sound was lousy. The sound on the '60s channel was worse. On some songs we could hear the lyrics; on others all we could distinguish were the instruments. Lots of bass, but not much midrange. Is that your experience?

How are you listening? I've had XM for years through my factory stereo, and don't notice the sound quality being bad at all.

Did you call them and ask them to reset or resend the signal to your device?

We don't have a problem at all with their audio. We have it in my car and we have it on our phones so we can listen to it at home with Bluetooth. We listened solely to XM on our seven-day trip from the west coast to the east coast and had no problems, well, other than an occasional losing the signal for a few seconds when we'd be in a really remote area. But on the major interstates and major state highways, we were just fine.

My preset stations that I listen to most are the '70s station, Classic Rock, Spectrum, Soul Town, Mosaic, and the '60s station. On my second page of presets, I have a few other channels that I tend to listen to not as often, but occasionally I enjoy opera, classical music and even the Willie Nelson station.
My husbands presets include the Springsteen channel. Most of the time they play Springsteen - it could be an album recording, or a recording of a live performance. It also might include other artists doing covers of his songs, or him doing covers of other artists' songs.

Although not preset stations, we also will occasionally use XM to listen to sports if we're in the car when a game is on that we care about.

Of all those channels, we've never had an issue with sound, either in the car, or at home.

I think you got a bum receiver.

Thanks.

The Prius sound system at best is not a prize winner, but I have a lot of music copied from CDs to my phone, and that sounds better through the Prius system than SXM does. I'll call 'em.

The sound is as good as the system for us. So even with standard ford radio it is fine. Reset advice seems spot on.

As for the selection it is ok but not amazing. I think I prefer other music services. It does not feel curated…more random.