Sirius Radio Sound Quality Poor

[aringrose]

Picked up my Gen 2 this weekend and enjoyed (mostly) the 650 mile drive home! This thing is amazing. I have, however, noted that the sound quality from the Sirius radio is not great. Connected phone and even HD FM sound noticeably better. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a way to up the bitrate?

 

[smurfslayer]

hmm... no, can’t say that I have. I did think I was noticing some weirdness with the speed adjusted volume, but all stock the stereo seems to clip out at high volumes.

 

[Guy]

It's Sirius.
They have variable bit rate and popular stations are streamed with more clarity than unpopular ones. Even their highest quality is less than a clear FM radio signal. That's not a raptor thing. That's a Sirius thing. They've been around for well over a decade and their technology has not improved. They mastered bundling their tech with cars to stay in businsss and they have a lot of nice content.


My advice as an audio enthusiast is to tether or your phone USB cable and apple or android car play... and stream Amazon prime at high quality setting. With good 4g signal it'll stream 320 bits which is DVD quality sound. High definition type stuff. It is the highest streaming bitrate of all the services right now.



Subscription is cheaper than Sirius and you have an enormous library.

Smurf...

Buy the pioneer speakers man! The clipping goes away! I promise!

 

[smurfslayer]

I’m scrounging pennies now Guy !

 

[evan9r]

I too noticed the horrible noise called music coming out of the speakers when tuned to Sirius. I never noticed it this bad in other cars but maybe I wasnt paying as much attention.

Like Guy said, tether your phone. It will sound much clearer.

I have Prime music as well but in my experience, the streaming quality is not there. I have purchased a handful of Amazon mp3s and had similar results. Even though they are 320, they clip horribly and I dont consider myself a true audiophile. I now only use Spotify, Pandora, or iHeartradio for streaming.

 

[Nv Guy]

This is one of the reasons we dropped Sirius years ago, not surprised they haven't improved. i just loaded my music on a flash drive and away i went.

 

[Huck]

Sirius in my truck sucks also. In my gen 1 I had no complaints. In my VW Golf R with fender stereo Sirius stream was awesome.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Wassy]

It's Sirius.
They have variable bit rate and popular stations are streamed with more clarity than unpopular ones. Even their highest quality is less than a clear FM radio signal. That's not a raptor thing. That's a Sirius thing. They've been around for well over a decade and their technology has not improved. They mastered bundling their tech with cars to stay in businsss and they have a lot of nice content.


My advice as an audio enthusiast is to tether or your phone USB cable and apple or android car play... and stream Amazon prime at high quality setting. With good 4g signal it'll stream 320 bits which is DVD quality sound. High definition type stuff. It is the highest streaming bitrate of all the services right now.



Subscription is cheaper than Sirius and you have an enormous library.

Smurf...

Buy the pioneer speakers man! The clipping goes away! I promise!

Good info. Actually Tidal and a couple others will stream at HD quality, 1411kbps, same as CD. They do it in FLAC format. It's about $20 a month last I checked. I also believe Spotify will stream at 320kbps.

One last suggestion with these services, and I think amazon prime
Allow same - you can go into offline mode and download the music to the phone so you aren't using data (T-Mobile doesn't charge data for music)

Having listened to both 1411 and 320kpbs in a car, hard to tell the difference. We upgraded our entire system with FOCAL and 2 amps and 2 subs, completely bypassing Sony amps. Sirius sound a tad better but nothing like streaming or your own USB/phone library.

 

[visual07]

I dropped Sirius

It's sad to have such a cool "sounding" service available only to have the sound quality suck. I let the free service run out and dropped Sirius. I use a couple of usb drives, one country and one rock. They sound totally fine. The quality of Sirius annoyed the H*ll out of me.

 

[WhatExit?]

You're listening to the wrong stuff on YsoSirius. Howard 100 is the only channel worth listening to. Well, except maybe BPM