Review: XM Radio for Your Car, Home, or Both
January 3, 2002
Review: XM Radio for Your Car, Home, or Both



    

courtesy eWEEK    



@

"There's nothing good on the radio." Motorists everywhere tender the same complaint whether they receive two dozen radio stations in a major urban market or they can't even pull in enough rural stations to fill five or six presets. One quick fix is the Sony DRN-XM01C XM Satellite Radio Receiver, an add-on module that receives 100 stations anywhere in the country and can be used in the car and in the house.

This $300 (street) receiver uses the new XM Satellite Radio service, which provides 71 music channels and 29 news, talk, and sports channels for a $9.99 monthly fee. Your listening tastes would have to be incredibly particular not to find something to like among the selections that include ten rock channels, three comedy channels, and channels devoted to hits by decade going back to the '40s. A competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio, charges $12.95 a month for 100 channels, but all 60 of its music channels are commercial-free versus about 30 on XM.

The Sony receiver is small, about the size and shape of a radar detector (3 by 4 by 6 inches, HWD), which could be a problem until thieves learn it's not a detector and has no value if stolen, because you can cut off service. You can install the receiver yourself, but you may prefer to have an audio shop do so to hide the considerable wiring, particularly the cable that goes to the roof antenna (which looks like a stubby shark fin). The box has five station presets and a roller wheel on top for tuning and for setting options.

How's the sound? Good but not great. That's because the device connects to your radio via a cassette adapter or broadcasts to your radio over an unused FM band if you have the model DRN-XM01R ($400). If you're lucky enough to have one of the few car radios with line-in jacks, use them. Built-in XM car receivers sound a bit better.

In use, we had a number of minor concerns. We lost the signal going under bridges and when in tunnels (urban areas have terrestrial repeaters, but they aren't always effective), and roughly once an hour we experienced a couple of seconds of signal loss in areas with a clear view of the sky. The two-line LCD display, which shows the artist and song, was hard to read unless mounted atop the dash (and angled at us), which, again, makes the device look like a radar detector. When placed in a cutout just under the radio of one test car, the interference caused an annoying squeal through the speakers. An included remote was handy by day but hard to use at night. Five presets were hardly enough to do justice to a 100-channel device.

You can undock the unit from its shell for use at home or in another car, but doing so gets pricey: $150 for the home module and $150 for another car module. The advantage over buying a second Sony unit or a competing in-car add-on like the Pioneer GEX-FM903XM ($250) is that you pay only a single monthly fee.

Even with the receiver's minor drawbacks, people who spend a lot of time in their cars will be pleased with the variety this satellite radio has to offer. Sony's XM Satellite Radio Receiver DRN-XM01C is the way to go if you don't want to replace your car radio outright with an XM radio/CD unit.

 

Google



Visitors:
(SiteStats)

Welcome to Ken Matsuoka's Home Radio