I love music. I love iPhone Spotify but their Mac app sucks.

[Kar98]

I come in at 110 Hz and there's nothing past 130 kHz:



I used to listen to AM a lot in the 80s. Saying SiriusXM sounds worse than that is silly. It's stereo, there's no yowl, no hiss, no crosstalk from nearby frequencies, and it doesn't go away when you change directions... or when the sun comes up, LOL.

Could be a question of which receiver one has, how it's installed and the quality of your audio equipment in the car would likely also play a role. The time compression of FM broadcast alone makes it sound horrible to me.

 

[Brains]

Like I said, if it sounds good to you, then listen to it. My equipment only accentuates the sound quality issues. Heck my "computer speakers" consist of an older Harmon/Kardon discrete output receiver, Yamaha NS-10MMT speakers in custom stands on the desk, and the matching 8" powered sub under the desk. The most obvious problems with XM are in the 8k+ range, where most hearing loss occurs. A crash cymbal for instance, doesn't even sound like a crash cymbal on XM.

FWIW, a YouTube video is not a great hearing test. But, for comparison, using my computer speaker setup at regular listening volume (~72dB), I'm good for 27Hz through just over 16kHz although there's a lot of quantization artifacts up there.

 

[HKShooter65]

Not trying to pick an argument, but do you really think Sirius XM sounds bad? Compared to what? I mean I only listen in the car, .

No way I'd argue about something as subjective as music.

Sirius/XM? I just think it is equal to FM radio and, as a comparison, I have a 128 gig thumb drive with a bunch (couple thousand) of high quality 320 Kbps MP3's that are as good or better than anything streaming.

My reference, sort of over the top, is my Bowers and Wilkins 800 series monitors.
Sad thing is that decades of stupid unprotected pistol shooting and standing up front at 15 years of ACL Music Fest has left me with tinnitus that overwhelms any music over about 9,000hz. Sad.

BTW......anybody else here going to ACL at Zilker in 4 days.???
Yay, Sir Paul McCartney.

 

[Brains]

I have a mild case of tinnitus too, but definitely nowhere near that bad. Tested again at home with a function generator and a set of Tannoy PBM-8 monitors, and unfortunately what I heard today at work is the same as what I hear at home; anything over about 16kHz is inaudible to me.

I've heard of and read a lot about B&W's over the years, they are very highly regarded. Never had the pleasure of listening to a set in person though.

 

[HKShooter65]

No, Sirius/XM doesn't sound bad. It sounds completely, embarrassingly, disgustingly AWFUL.

Sirius/XM is less than stellar to many.
Agree to disagree for now.
.................................
Let's go the other direction.
Which streaming service has the BEST sound quality.

The two that get my money, Spotify and Apple, sound the same.
..................................
https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/ne...n-audio-and-which-streaming-services-offer-it

According to that article link:
Spotify is 320Kbps
Apple is 256 Kbps
Tidal Lossless is 1411 Kbps

The Audiophile Golden Ear stores and web sites say Tidal is the best there is.

I did the Tidal free month and could not hear it's superiority.
My Bowers & Wilkins speakers, I'd think, could reveal the difference.
My firearm/music impaired ears could discern no benefit to the Tidal super-quality.

Tidal is largely owned by rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West so the interface is rap heavy.
Rappers may, perhaps, by driven to provide superior sound quality. They do have younger ears than I.

 

[HKShooter65]

I have a mild case of tinnitus too, but definitely nowhere near that bad. anything over about 16kHz is inaudible to me.

That difference between 8,000 hz and 16,000 hz is one octave.
The differance between 20 hz and 40 hz is also one octave.

The extremes in the audible spectrum are quite important to music.

Fortunate for me there is not a lot of recorded music content above about 10,000hz.
If there is I just have to survive without it.

 

[HKShooter65]

BTW a devilish trick:

I have a free frequency generator app in my iPhone.

I can set it to put out a constant tone at about 15-17,000 hz give or take.
I put the phone on my belt and just walk around work.
It drives the 25 y/o ladies nuts!
They hear it, pull at their ears, but there is no localizing directionality to it.

 

[Brains]

That difference between 8,000 hz and 16,000 hz is one octave.
The differance between 20 hz and 40 hz is also one octave.

The extremes in the audible spectrum are quite important to music.

Fortunate for me there is not a lot of recorded music content above about 10,000hz.
If there is I just have to survive without it.

There actually is a TON of musical content above 10k. You stated you're deaf above 13k, which means you're missing out on an incredibly significant portion of the upper harmonics of nearly every instrument. The fundamental frequencies of voice and most instruments are indeed below 8k. So you can hear and understand the content, but you're genuinely missing out on a lot of it. Coincidentally, XM exploits this. Their psychoacoustic model, ridiculously low bitrate, and chosen compression algorithm all target the upper harmonics heavily. If you are physically unable to hear those upper harmonics anyway, XM will sound "fine" or even "good." It's akin to a woman looking just as pretty to a legally blind man watching her on an old tube TV as on a 4k OLED display - those eyes are going to see the same blur either way.

So to your point, perhaps I could run both XM and Spotify through an 8kHz, 24dB/octave low-pass filter, and they would sound somewhat similar. If I had an active XM account I'd do just that, for science. But the fact is I would be unhappy listening to either, because I am used to hearing all those upper harmonics. It would be akin to me listening with 3 pillows over each ear.

 

[Kar98]

BTW a devilish trick:

I have a free frequency generator app in my iPhone.

I can set it to put out a constant tone at about 15-17,000 hz give or take.
I put the phone on my belt and just walk around work.
It drives the 25 y/o ladies nuts!
They hear it, pull at their ears, but there is no localizing directionality to it.

That video I posted above... half the people in the vicinity of my desk started barking and howling, the other half shat their pants.

Dunno how old you are, but when I was a kid, I could not stand being in the same room with certain models TV, because they threw out a high pitched noise that was quite piercing and loud to me, but completely inaudible to anybody else.

 

[Brains]

Yeah the old tube type TV's were annoying, the flyback transformer was often switched at like 18kHz. I can't count the number of times we'd be getting ready to leave a house, and I'd tell someone they left their TV on. Some people were quite baffled how I knew, especially when the TV was in another room and with no show playing or muted.

 

[HKShooter65]

There actually is a TON of musical content above 10k. You stated you're deaf above 13k, which means you're missing out on an incredibly significant portion of the upper harmonics of nearly every instrument.

Fortunate for me probably not entirely true.

Here:



I do agree that the higher 3rd, 4th, 5th harmonics do get up there but....
Most instrument's harmonics don't get into the half octave above that 10k where I'm sorely/sadly lacking.
Pretty much nothing reaches 20k, one octave above what I hear.
Each level harmonics is accompanied my decreasing amplitude too.

You are certainly partly right.
My earl partly suck.

 

[HKShooter65]

...to your point, perhaps I could run both XM and Spotify through an 8kHz, 24dB/octave low-pass filter, and they would sound somewhat similar. ...

Maybe I'm wrong but the poor quality of XM/Sirius has less to do with lack of higher frequencies that it does the huge amount of compression, explained here:
http://www.carstereochick.com/2015/04/25/why-siriusxm-sucks-what-to-know-before-you-buy-subscribe/

I'm pretty sure that with a fixed bandwidth XM/Sirius has opted for more channels with poorer quality as a marketing model rather that higher quality sent through less choices of stations.

With the enormous internet bandwidth most of us are blessed with high resolution audio is easily accomplished.

In the 80s then CDs were introduced their 1.4 Mbps(hard wired) was astoundingly fast.
I think the 5G systems being installed now will be about 1,000 times that fast....to our phones...for what I do not yet know.
We will be able to document our tarnished and destroyed reputations on Facebook faster than ever before.

 

[toddnjoyce]

Maybe I'm wrong but the poor quality of XM/Sirius has less to do with lack of higher frequencies that it does the huge amount of compression, explained here:
http://www.carstereochick.com/2015/04/25/why-siriusxm-sucks-what-to-know-before-you-buy-subscribe/

I'm pretty sure that with a fixed bandwidth XM/Sirius has opted for more channels with poorer quality as a marketing model rather that higher quality sent through less choices of stations.

Summary:

SiriusXM delivers very lossy compressed audio to the listener.

For some this is acceptable, for others not so much.

Hollow audio sucks, but when your choice is AM or XM between Balmorrhea and Ozona, you take what you get.

XM doesn’t work deliver very reliably along I-70 in CO between Denver and Grand Junction due to line o sight issues created by God.

 

[Kar98]

http://www.carstereochick.com/2015/04/25/why-siriusxm-sucks-what-to-know-before-you-buy-subscribe/

LOTS of whining that SXM sucks because installers can't charge $100 for installing these things. Well duh, I have the receiver the writer mentioned, the SXV300, and it literally installs in five minutes, if you're taking it slowly.

SOME explanation as to why my installation doesn't suck as much as some people would have it: decent head unit with pre-amp and equalizer, 8 speakers in the car, and a big-ass amp under the seat. Also, the satellite receiver is plugged into the rear of the head unit into a proprietary jack, kinda like the old eight pin DIN plugs; rather than using aux-in or Bluetooth.

 

[Brains]

XM sucks because it sounds 'warbly' to use a made-up word - like you're swirling and sloshing around a bucket of water with an AM radio in it. Personally I can't fathom how anyone can listen to it, because it drives me absolutely bonkers. When I bought the Camaro, it came with some number of months of "free" service, so I tried it again - took all of 10 seconds to hear it still sucks

 

[HKShooter65]

LOTS of whining that SXM sucks .....decent head unit with pre-amp and equalizer, 8 speakers in the car, and a big-ass amp under the seat. Also, the satellite receiver is plugged into the rear of the head unit into a proprietary jack........

You have huge respect and fascination from me if you are still doing that.

The last 7 or 8 vehicles I've bought, 3 American, 2 Japaneese and 2 German, all had free XM that sucked in quality, though the mindless convenience pleases some.

I rather doubt that any one of the vehicles had a non-proprietary head unit that would be easily amenable to the dying art of customizing auto sound in the way you describe.

Every one of those vehicles had an auxiliary input and/or Bluetooth connectivity that, with 60 seconds of fiddling provided sound quality that far exceeds anything S/XM can provide.

Nothing can fix the S/XM compression. A better system just makes the inferior quality more apparent and more painful.
AM radio music through my Bowers & Wilkins speakers would be miserable, not that I plan to test that conjecture.


Not to mention, infinitely important, S/XM if "push content" that generally shovels something into my ears that I really do not wish to listen to.

Streaming from my phone is just a dream for one such as me who grew up with cleaning dust off my vinyl albums.

 

[HKShooter65]

BTW to return to my core bitchin'............

A comment from the OP of this thread!!!!!!

I spent the day(3 of them actually) at ACL Music Fest and my Spotify app on my iMAC streaming to my Sonos system is freaking frozen!!! Though it's stuck playing David Byrne who was quite amazing on stage Friday after all these years.

There is a fantastic Spotify ACL 2018 playlist with 628 songs(41 hours of content) BTW FYI.

 

[HKShooter65]

WTF
Discovered something favorable tonight.

I've been griping about how slow responding my Spotify app is on my dazzling-fast 2018 iMac.

I, tonight, fired up my dust-collecting 2014 11 inch old MacBook Air.
It has a 2016 version of the Spotify app that is dazzlingly fast.

My "WTF" reaction was gut wrenching.

On investigation and comparison I found a "Hardware Acceleration" line under the "Spotify" dropdown that was unchecked!!
Checking it made the Mac Spotify on my new iMac light-speed fast.

Problem solved.

Don't know what/why the "Harware Acceleration" line would even exist.
Anyway.....tail-between-the-hindquarters embarrassment.

It works great now.
Several boards I found with bitching about the lost-slow app.
Gotta chalk this one up to user error!!!!!

Yay Spotify.

HkS

 

[clo5]

Just get Apple music

 

[Kar98]

To bring this old three back up, yes, I finally agree, SXM does sound like ass. No highs no lows, and the bits inversen are compressed as hell.
You don’t realize that until you put in a CD instead or stream from any app, including the SXM app.
And as far as reception in the middle of nowhere goes? Well what do you know, turns out that’s spotty as hell too away from big cities. Not sure how that works. Thought you could get sat reception anywhere in North America.