Sounds disappointing:
Is Satellite Radio Ready to Take Its Act on the Road?
By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, July 7, 2002; Page H07
What can be worse than driving the same miserable, traffic-clogged, -scrambled commute every working day? How about listening to the same miserable, playlist-choked, advertising-strangled radio broadcast every working day?
But that's all that most commercial FM stations can think to offer. Is this bland free content all that people want, or would they be willing to pay for more variety?
In the case of TV, millions of Americans have opened up their wallets to pay for premium cable and satellite service, and nobody thinks that strange.
Two digital satellite services are betting that the same equation will apply to radio.
One, District-based XM Satellite Radio, announced on Monday that it has signed up more than 136,000 subscribers since its start last fall. The second company, Sirius Satellite Radio of New York, announced its nationwide launch Monday.
I tested XM's service last November and found a lot to like. For $9.99 a month, you get access to 69 music channels and 31 news, sports and talk channels with far more diversity than FM can dream of. The downsides were the cost and a few dropped signals around the Washington area.
Sirius differs from XM in several key aspects. It costs more, $12.95 a month, but promises no ads on any of its 60 music channels. It also uses a different system of satellites and land-based repeater antennas -- so you can't get both Sirius and XM using one radio. (Sirius receivers do include FM and AM tuners, which you'll need for traffic reports and other local info.)
Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Jeep, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury, Nissan and others have announced plans to offer Sirius equipment in their vehicles. Otherwise, hardware starts at $320 for an in-dash receiver and $80 for an antenna; home and portable receivers will be available later.
I tried Sirius's service for five days, covering more than 300 miles in the District, Maryland and Virginia in an SUV lent by the radio company.
The Sirius music menu covers most of the major variations of classical, country, dance, hip-hop, jazz, Latin, R&B, rock and then some -- bluegrass, chamber music, electronica, blues, reggae, gospel and heavy metal each gets its own channel.
You can hear '80s rappers like Kurtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash on the "Backspin" channel, while Tom Waits growls his version of "Coney Island Baby" on the "Left of Center" channel. Over on "Alt Country," you can catch the likes of Merle Haggard and Uncle Tupelo. Sirius lets Web users tune in free online (www.siriusradio.com), a generous touch.
There are no commercials, although the channel-ID blurbs can be the functional equivalent of them. You may not hear much from the deejay, but Sirius receivers display the artist and song title for the current song.
Sound quality was generally close to that of CDs, but I could sometimes hear a faint, gauzy sibilance around such high tones as the treble notes in a piano concerto.
Sirius also carries 40 news, talk and sports channels, from sources including the BBC, National Public Radio and ESPN. (Satellite listeners can get NPR only on Sirius -- a dubious exclusive, given how easy it is to find NPR on your FM dial.) Unlike the music channels, these do include commercials. They also sounded significantly worse, with such obvious signs of digital compression as a tinny, metallic tone heard in voices.
But what really reminded me that I was using a satellite-based system was the maddeningly uncertain reception. The Sirius signal came through fine in most places, including such commuter routes as New York Avenue, Interstate 295 and 16th Street NW (even in the Interstate 395 tunnel downtown). But it dropped out in too many other spots for no apparent reason.
Some outages lasted just for an instant -- for example, the blips of silence at toll booths on the Dulles Toll Road and just after some Beltway overpasses.
At other times, the signal wouldn't stop hiccuping for miles on end, such as the upper stretches of Beach Drive in the District and Burdette Road in Bethesda. The radio also went silent for several seconds at Washington Boulevard and Interstate 395 in Virginia -- then conked out for even longer around the Springfield interchange. And the service was simply unlistenable inside two parking garages.
The problem may relate to Sirius's overall design. Its three satellites fly overlapping, elliptical orbits that keep two over the United States at any given time, each at different angles to the ground. The company says this ensures reception well enough to let it use just 92 repeater antennas to cover any gaps. (Its receivers also cache a few seconds' worth of signal to ride out interruptions.)
XM, by contrast, has just two satellites parked in geostationary earth orbit over the United States but more than 1,000 repeaters nationwide.
Sirius says it's still fine-tuning its service to address these problems. Until it fixes these gaps, I can't recommend the service.
XM had far fewer reception problems in my tests and offered more variety on its 69 music channels (for instance, XM's African, Chinese and South Asian offerings have no equivalent on Sirius). Nearly half of these channels are themselves commercial-free.
Sirius could soundly beat XM on one aspect -- pricing structure. But it repeats XM's mistake of requiring one subscription per receiver. Neither company offers a family-plan discount, nor can you share service among multiple receivers by swapping out access cards, as satellite-TV providers DirecTV and Dish Network allow.
This seems a strange oversight. Why not cut a break for customers who like the service enough to want to listen to it outside of their cars? |
