HD vs. satellite radio: Readers sound off

Other readers acknowledged the sound quality issue, but insisted they didn't care:

Douglas Jacobson: Your argument about having incredible sound is 100% true, however, the excitement of satellite radio is not about it "sounding better," but about having niche segmented (mostly) commercial-free music.

Jeff Breitner: You’re right; the sound from HD radio is incredible. The problem for incumbent broadcasters is that it’s the SAME drab radio that’s driving people to satellite. I have, for all of my 40 years of existence, tolerated analog FM without much problem. Works great, lasts a long time. But since nearly all radio seems to be programmed by five guys sitting in a conference room in New York, I’ve had no choice but to seek alternative programming methods.

I’ve been writing about satellite radio for more than five years, since before it became widely available. I have both XM and Sirius radios and listen to them often in my car and at home. (Did you know that you can use the same antenna for both XM and Sirius?) I've also auditioned many other car and home units over the years.

At their best they sound good. At their worst they sound horrible — like a MP3 song file processed to take up very little hard drive space. There are a number of technical reasons for current satellite radio sound quality; I won’t bore you with most of them. In a nutshell, each satellite service sends out one signal which then has to be un-squeezed/sorted out into a hundred or so channels by the receiver. Not all channels are created equally.  Some channels are allowed to sound better than others.

At their best, music channels on a satellite radio system offer about half the bandwidth of a local FM radio station signal. There just isn’t enough room for numerous higher fidelity feeds. That means, at its best, satellite radio barely approaches terrestrial radio sound quality. I won’t discuss satellite music stations which utilize less bandwidth than the better sounding ones. And forget about all-talk feeds. When you get a chance, try to listen at the same time to something like "Car Talk" on both FM and satellite. Switch back and forth and compare what you hear.  One sounds like it's being channeled through a car muffler.

As for those who say they're fine favoring content over sound quality: Shame on you! Content is important but so is the overall quality of the listening experience.

But if you do feel that way, I'm assuming you're just as uncritical of quality when it comes to your television viewing. I hope you’re not thinking of buying a large-screen HDTV or renting monthly digital cable services. You can get the gist and enjoy TV programming by watching on a $99 TV that you buy in Costco or Sam’s Club. You could use regular, analog cable services. That way you can still enjoy the show without having to worry about the problems/costs of high quality TV viewing. It’s the programming that counts, right? Not the way it looks!

THAT'S JUST PLAIN WRONG. It's both. If you like your satellite radio service you should be complaining about the sound quality. Tell them you deserve better for your monthly fee.

Same for you if you prefer AM/FM radio. Tell the behemoths how you feel about their endless commercials. Let them know you’ll switch to satellite radio if they don’t do something about it.

Quality radio might be within our reach.  It would be nice if someone gave us a choice of good-sounding stations that don’t bombard us with tons of crap.

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