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XM Online

I have been searching for a way to listen to XM Radio via one of my two systems. I have XM in both of our family cars and I'm a big fan of thier jazz & classical channels (FM radio here in Cincinnati is awful, save for our excellent local classical station WGUC). The very best answer seams to be a Magnum Dynalab XM tuner, which is completely out of the question financially right now. I had considered purchasing a Polk XRt12 XM tuner, which has a digital output, and running that through my old tried & true CAL Sigma DAC. However I have heard nothing but negative things about the audio quality of such a combo-due to the truncated signal of the XM broadcast.

I might have run across a possible solution: I have ordered an HRT Music Streamer+ USB DAC in order to utilize itunes via my laptop on my secondary dining room system (no more having CD's floating around from one floor of out townhouse to another), and I just learned that XM Online service is available for an extra $3 per month and XM claims that its online service is "a near CD quality 128 kbps" stream. I am wondering what kind of quality I would get by running XM Online from my laptop into my system via the HRT Music Streamer+?

Might anyone have experience with XM Online (or the Music Streamer+ for that matter)??
craig_hoch
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tomcy6's avatar
tomcy6
2,542 posts
 
Hi Craig, I have listened to XM online and it sounds good, like XM satellite but is probably not up to the quality of cds on your system. I found the info below on Wikipedia:

Audio (MP3)
32 kbit/s – MW (AM) quality

96 kbit/s – FM quality

128–160 kbit/s – Standard Bitrate quality; difference can sometimes be obvious (e.g. lack of low frequency quality and high frequency "swashy" effects)

192 kbit/s – DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) quality.[1]
224–320 kbit/s – VBR to highest MP3 quality

800 bit/s – minimum necessary for recognizable speech (using special-purpose FS-1015 speech codecs)

8 kbit/s – telephone quality (using speech codecs)

32-500 kbit/s -- lossy audio as used in Ogg Vorbis

500 kbit/s–1,411kbit/s – lossless audio as used in formats such as Free Lossless Audio Codec, WavPack or Monkey's Audio

1,411.2 kbit/s – PCM sound format of Compact Disc Digital Audio
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