Sirius in E Class

[crwilli]

My wife's '13 E-Class Sirius radio sounds like crap 70% of the time. I hear a warble or vibration in cymbals, saxophone basically any fairly pure tone. The dealer is clueless to what I am hearing as is my wife. The CD player or iPOD connection or stored media center all sound good and significantly better than the sirius radio. Even the FM radio sounds better than Sirius. My wife likes Sirius as do I in concept but can't get past the sound. I have had XM before and thought it sounded fine.

Has anyone else had a problem with Sirius? Is it unique to the E Class? Is it known to be worse than XM? eg is it compressed more?

Our trial is coming to an end and I trying to decide to renew.

Thanks!

[junker]

I cancelled Sirius after hearing the same track that I had on CD. The quality was terrible (extremely compressed, low bitrate) that I decided to cancel, even after they come back with the $4/mo deal.

The only reason I would have it is for some of their premium content: sports, talk shows, FOX, BBC, NPR, etc. Tethered iPhone with Pandora One or Mog is so much better IMHO.

[junker]

P.S.: I had always wondered if they ended up using more compression after the merger to host all of the stations from both networks? I didn't remember it being that bad in 2007 when it was just Sirius, but with Sirius XM it wasn't even pleasurable to listen to.

[Kal Rubinson]

Sirius always sounds like crap, imho. When I got my car (Audi), I thought it was the sound system but, after switching to FM or, even better, to USB drive with uncompressed music files, it became clear that Sirius is the culprit.

[allen_bh]

Sirius and XM now use the same "back end" so all their music comes from the same highly compressed source. It's the equivalent of 128K mp3 or less. Some car audio systems have circuitry to help with the compression but you can obviously see the results. The problem is that now that XM And Sirius are the same company, they have added more channels to the same transponders and had to compress them to accommodate. It wasn't this bad in the beginning of satellite radio. In fact they first advertised as "CD quality".

Shame really. Anyone compared HD Radio?

[Still-One]

Several of out recent vehicles (Audi, Cadillac, BMW ,Land Rover) all came with XM/Sirius. Once the free trial was over, we dumped them.

[DonBattles]

Why don't you ask the dealer to let you listen to some other E-Class vehicle, and maybe other models, and see if they sound the same as yours? If they do then you might figure it's a firmware/software issue in the 2013 (none that I know of) or the is just pure crap. You might also try to listen to some older models, 2012 on down. I will say that I drove a 2013 demo for 2 days and was not impressed with the audio system.