Death of Satellite Radio
When XM and Sirius first appeared on the scene I was very excited. Here was a new method for listening to music, one not constrained by the mega-programming, payola driven, ad based homogeny. And for a shiny brief period of time I was in love with satellite radio. It didn’t matter what kind of music you liked, you could find stuff on XM and Sirius that you couldn’t find anywhere else in a “radio” format (not counting internet radio, which is kind of tough to listen to in the middle of the desert).
But then two things happened. The first and most horrifying: the audio quality became unbearable. Both providers started with high levels of compression to squeeze a lot of channels out. It was pretty audible, and honestly, bad. But it was tolerable. All you did was roll down the window, punch yourself in the ears a few times and you wouldn’t mind so much. Then one day I turned on my XM radio and everyone suddenly developed a lisp while singing! I was horrified, maybe my antenna was having trouble, maybe my radio was having problem re-assembling the data and struggling. So I ran in and turned on my portable XM radio and heard……lisping.
I waited a couple of weeks, told myself they were having satellite problems, it will get fixed. But no, it didn’t get fixed. I called in customer support to ask whether they had reduced the bit rates on each channels and after waiting on hold, being connected to “Steve” who listened to me, ran through his script and told me he could help me with my problem. My problem was I HAD MY RADIO TOO LOUD AND I WAS DISTORTING. I thanked Steve, hung up, called back to cancel my account. When I was connected to a “retention specialist” he finally admitted that yes they had reduced the bandwidth, but only because we the customer demanded it. I moved on to Sirius, which still sounded ok, but didn’t have the channels I liked.
And then it happened again. One day I noticed that there was a distinct pre-echo on a rhythm guitar track I know very well. And hi-hats sounded like packets of sand. The only good part: Siruis admitted it immediately. And I moved on.
And today, with iPhones, faster broad access to cellular IP data, and internet radio the days of satellite radio are numbered. Only thing I’ll miss is the traffic reports, but I guess that what the google maps on my iPhone is for.
Edmund
Posted June 2nd, 2009
Previous post: Artificial Artificial Intelligence OR There's Something about Randomness (acting on things with inherent structure)
0 Comments