What hardware do you recommend to play Sirius...

  • Thread starter Thread starter dalmussen
  • Start date Start date
First of all, my limited Sirius experience has been excellent. There is a wide variety of music and talk channels (ok, so I really am doing it for Stern), apparently with a better variety than XM from what I have heard. The ability to niche broadcast without commercials allows them to go really deep in any category, as opposed to sticking to the proven radio format that is supported by ad dollars. Becuase they play so many bsides, live concerts, and lesser known artists and albums, I have discovered quite a bit of new music, and it really makes services like YMU come to life - after an hour in the car, I can hop onto YMU and grab some good music I would not have otherwise discovered.You can go to Sirius.com and sign up for a free day to sample the channels via streaming to your pc (mac support is pretty spotty).Regarding hardware, it all depends on where you plan to do most of your listening. I commute an hour a day, so I opted to get it installed as a "head unit" in my car - the Alpine CDA-9855 (cd, satellite, with native ipod support). You need line of site to the satellites, so using it indoors can be tricky if you cannot put an antenna on the roof. It is possible to listen indoors because they use "repeaters" which allows radios to pick up the signal through a radio antenna without direct line of site to satellites, but people have had limited success with this. A new unit that just came out is called the S50, and it allows you to not only listen to the service in your car or outdoors, but also record songs like an MP3 player for later playback (has up to 4 hours of recording time). Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with the service. 1 unit costs $13 per month, and you can add additional units for an extra $6 per unit.
 
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