It’s been, oh 5  years I think since XM launched ( google break  ) back in late 2001   when I harrassed , cajoled and basically made a pain in the ass of the distributors until I got my first XM radio the Sony xm01  which for a 77 channel service at launch SUCKED with a five channel memory but given that  we were in a test market , Phoenix has long commute times, and that nothing else was available it was the best , practicaly , I could get my hands on.  I was an enthusiast . Over time the sound quality has been degrading as new channels get piled on  and it’s not all in my head as this massive  thread will testify to.

In the early days I could write a customer request and get quick responses with people that weren’t restricted to a canned reply ( tonight I sent 2 mails with differing content that received the same  response)  Tonight I have cancelled my longest continguous subscription  based on the only recourse customer have when  reasonable requests to have the service we believed we’d paid for more closely resemble the claim for sound quality.   In short they have only so much bandwidth which means the 77 channels at launch are now  170 today ( some are  not on all the time since they are reserved for  the baseball)  within the same space  so guess how much robbing  Peter (Gabriel) to pay Paul  (McCartney) is going on? A lot

Too many artifacts can be heard  it’s nowhere near cd quality on all but a chosen few stations. Add in  a capricious  voice response phone system,  canned email replies that don’t pretend to address your issues   and an accidental cancellation of my account without notice from their end had  eroded my  advocate status to ex customer over a six month period.

There's a larger issue here re people's acceptance of "good enough" audio which for many environments is a fair trade off..When you sell a service on quality though..  it's not.