Radio sucks in Vancouver.
SO I thinking about getting satelitte radio for home, my car and wife’s car
how does it work? is it even still around? I didnt pay much attention to it back in 2005… I kinda wish I did
do I have to purchase 3 accounts to get home, and 2 car activation?
any help would be great…thanks
I really love my satellite radio and have had it since 2003 and I won’t ever give it up. You don’t need to buy three accounts as you can add more radios to the main account at a reduced cost. You shouldnt even need to buy a home account as you can stream the stuff over the internet.
I got completely fed up with regular radio years ago and now I can’t do without XM in my car. It’s well worth the money to me.
I’ve been looking into it a bit lately myself. Sirius/XM have actually been doing better since the merger, but they still maintain different lineups and packages. So the first thing you have to do is figure out which lineup and package you are interested in. Do that before you buy any hardware.
You could, in theory, buy three sets of hardware. But there is really no reason since you can buy car/home combo kits that use a single receiver. Some of them are really easy to take out of the car (which also reduces the theft issue).
As a counterpoint, unless you listen to top 40 music, the satellite radio service allocate so little bandwidth to other stations that I found any other music station basically unlistenable. This isn’t really an issue for talk radio, but I found listening to the various classical stations to be unbearable.
That’s a good point about your listening habits. I prefer classic through 90s rock, so there are plenty of stations.
I’ve had sat for years, but I’m also going to get an ipod adapter hook up so I can listen to my own music as well. I’m currently running an aux cable from my ipod, but I want to have it controlled by my radio.
Counterpoint 2: get a smartphone hookup on your car and stream music, sometimes with a free app, even. Spotify, Pandora, and Slacker are all heavily used in my car and I don’t think I use the radio at all anymore.
Also, the power of <skip> is a miracle of car tune listening.
EDIT: I was able to allow for not only hookup to my car, but also the ability to use the steering wheel selectors with something like this…
http://www.gromaudio.com/
I wanted to use Spotify in the car, but the sound of the music coming off my phone plugged into the AUX vs the built in Sirius was too wide. Frankly the Spotify sucked.
Classical music has just had a hard time in this new world of mp3’s, Spotify, Itunes, and satellite radio. Perhaps we can discuss it in Music sometime. In the meantime I would suggest listening to kusc.org for excellent classical music programming (as long as you don’t mind the quarterly begging for money segments).
Coincidentally, I was just looking into what it would take to get satellite radio through my existing head unit. Turns out you can get Sirius or XM tuners that plug into the back. But now that those companies have merged, does it matter which one you get?
I thought only XM was available in Canada. I know my legacy XM is running a promo on best of Sirius (which is the combo pack that includes the Sirius-specific stuff like NFL and Stern), and that isn’t available in Canada.
As noted above, it is available, you will need to have a subscription for each unit (although you can swap), but each additional subscription gets discounted. Check the lineups carefully to see if it matches your musical taste. Classical, as noted, gets short shrift. Jazz is light, but perhaps heavy relative to the alternatives. Rap and Hip-hop seem under-represented relative to mindshare. Since the merger, the pair has put more stress on single artist stations (Elvis, Jimmy Buffet, Pearl Jam), which is decidedly not to my taste. I’m seeking variety on my radio airplay; I can make my own single artist station with an Ipod and shuffle.
If you are a sports fan, especially a transplant, then satellite is the bees knees. Huge coverage, all the sports talk you can stand, and then just a little more.
I’m pretty sure the channel lineups have been completely merged at this point.
I’ve been with Sirius since 2006 when Stern migrated, and honestly I can’t live without it now. I mainly rotate between 4 stations but it’s well worth the money.
Our car was in the shop for a day and we had a rental that didn’t have Sirius and we went crazy. There’s nothing worth listening too on regular radio, even in a major market like Boston. It’s all shitty hiphop or pop garbage, and about 30 minutes of every hour is obnoxious ads.
We currently have 2 cars but only 1 subscription. What I do when I need to use the other car, which doesn’t have Sirius, is plug my phone into the Aux jack and use their Android app to stream it. It works pretty well but it can be spotty, and unless you have unlimited data that’s going eat up your gigabytes quick.
So, yeah, I recommend it.
thanks for all the info so far… so nice to hear your feedback
approximately how much do you pay a month if I wanted to use it in the house (stream internet) and two cars?
thanks … Canuck dollars…
I like Stern (mostly just his interviews which he rocks) but since his renegotiated agreement, I never hear live stuff on the air anymore in the AM. It’s cheap enough to have him on the plan, but at this rate I may just cancel H100. It was pretty stupid to give him a flexible schedule.
I didn’t know there was an extra charge for Howard’s channels? I’ve always just had them.
He does work 3 day weeks now, though, and he takes most of the summer off. I’ve been listening since I was 13, though, so I’ll be there til the end.
I think if you are on XM you could add him.
Also I have never noticed the music being compressed as all of the channels sound the same to me.
Strange. I would think it would be similar to the other radio apps. I use them for daily driving to and from work and have never even exceeded 1 GB total for the month. I think my highest month was 600 MB or so.
As a bonus, the Slacker radio app offers caching if you’re a paid member, making it an even better deal since it’s not tied to a network connection at all.
I kill 5 GB per month easy, more if I’m watching a lot of You Tube in the restroom. I stream Sirius via my phone at my desk at work on most days.
I usually listen to podcasts but when we do road trips we usually listen to Slacker Radio from my iPhone. Better quality then most of the other streaming services and good radio selection with tweaks.
I thought you pay extra for the android streaming app or is that just for web streaming?