Satellite radio, has taken off somewhat in part due vehicle manufacturer’s installing satellite receivers in new vehicles.
So lets say that you buy a new car and upgrade the stereo to premium component system with satellite radio, sounds like your in for some pretty high end sound doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, you’d be better off downloading the lowest bitrate you could find for your i-Pod and playing it back through the FM radio modulator.
Satellite radio has been excused from showing actual bitrates of digital music broadcasts, and luckily so. If people knew that the bitstream was such substandard quality, who in their right mind would invest in a Satellite radio system and actually pay a monthly fee for the lowest quality broadcast music available to date?
With M3 downloads being a poorly compressed/lossy reproduction of the original, where does satellite radio compare?
A good MP3 weighs in at 320kbps, the average from i-Tunes (and most popular with kiddies) is 128kbps (ya its quite sad I know, I know).;(
Satellite radio in comparison, varies throughout the day, as traffic is busier bandwidth is reduced. The AVERAGE bitrate of Satellite radio is 48kbps, with a high being around 96kbps.
Hang on, that’s less than the crappiest sounding MP3’S?
Morover that is a GOOD bitrate for satellite, with many broadcasts during higher use times, such as rush hour, offering as low as 34kbps (which is suitable for news and talk radio but nowhere near a reasonable standard for audio).
So, now mankind has evolved from appreciating 1441kbps music, down to 320kbps, to 128kbps and now millions actually [b]pay[/b] for 34kbps!
Shakespear once said, if music be teh food of love, play on.
Little did he know that sonic quality would become obsolete as people’s ears slowly got used to accepting the hyper-compressed, lossy formats of today.
Satellite seems to have become the modern day Bose of the marketing world. People listing to marketing and believe they are hearing what they really aren’t.
There have been lawsuits over XM advertising “digital quality” with that being interpreted as meaning “high quality”, in actuality “digital clarity” simply refers to “static free” and is not in relation to the broadcast quality of the music itself.
