They’re charging people for their service and then intentionally imitating the radio station experience people can get for free? Seems like a bad business model.
People pay to hear music. Nobody pays to hear DJ’s.
You just beat me to it; Earl Bailey ad Meg Griffin are very knowledgeable about the music they play and I enjoy listening to them. Same with all the DJs I have heard on Margaritaville, tho the women all sound similar as do the men so I’m never sure who I’m listening to. I do agree they play all the same songs a lot. However, I love the BB King Bluesville channel as there’s lots of stuff that’s new to me. Probably it’s equally repetitious but since it’s new to me I don’t mind. So far.
As for the listening-on-the-computer, I need to get that going so I can get some of the Dead shows. (Can you actually listen to all the same channels on line? I got the impression that it was only certain select things.)
I agree, too much chatter, but my wife and I love classic country. Not many other sources for that.
I listened to Cousin Brucie on WABC in NY in the sixties. He’s become a real bore.
This is probably an issue with your particular setup. I live in the boonies and if I want to change the station, it’s pretty much instantaneous. I get the Mostly Music package and am thrilled with the choices.
I’ve had Sirius (and now SiriusXM) for years, first because it’s so much easier for road trips, and second because terrestrial radio in my area is awful. For some reason the few stations that play music that I like here insist on having those moronic morning shows, so I’d get tons of hyuk hyuk drivel and almost no music at all during a 30-40 minute commute into work. I am glad to still have a CD player, but it only plays one disk at a time so I’d rather not fuss with it while driving.
heh i listen to 95.5 KLOS in la where you will often get encyclopedic knowledge on a song the album the group who played the album the writer of the song and anything else that the dj might know about it so youd hear a song every 10 minutes or so … or youd hear an 45-60 minute album and 2 hours of discussion …
In fact it used to be that if you didn’t know anything about what they played you simply didn’t get hired …they wanted people whos knowledge of rock could be on jeopardy …(even mark and brian have extensive knowledge of rock history)
To be clear: on a small number of their stations, they are intentionally imitating the experience of listening to a radio station that was contemporary to the music that’s being played on that station (though, without the ads).
I agree – it sounds like an issue with Just Asking Questions’ radio. I’ve had SiriusXM in two cars, and in a number of rental cars, and getting a new station’s signal has nearly never taken more than a second.
I think that there may be a small handful of channels, at most, that you can’t get via online streaming. OTOH, they also offer a lot of additional channels that you can only get online, so there’s that.
This, exactly. I love the 60s and 70s channels precisely because the hosts bring back the days of Top 40s radio with their patter. Best of all, there are no ads. The hosts don’t go on very long–their airchecks never seem to be over fifteen seconds, tops, and are often shorter; and then we’re back to music.
I will agree with the others who feel that Cousin Brucie is well past his Best Before date. When he comes on, I just flip up to the 70s or 80s.
whatever radio JAQ’s car has just sounds like the software running on it is garbage. There’s no real thing as a “station” for SiriusXM; you’re not changing the frequency the tuner is receiving when you select a channel. the signal is just one big encrypted digital stream, and selecting a “channel” is just telling the MCU which bits of the stream to pick out, decode, and play for you.
I don’t know if I’ll find something I like, but I can darn sure find something else! With the amount of station changing I do, it’s a wonder I don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome. 
2019 Chevy Colorado. It really is clunky. Next time I’m driving I’ll give it a valid test. But it does seem like if I hit the station button on the wheel twice, it…
…changes.
Third.
I recently bought a Sony head for my RAV4 and then upgraded the stock speakers. Nothing fancy. I basically wanted the USB port for a thumb drive with my MP3s and the BT interface for my cell phone. The Sony unit had a port for a SiriusXM receiver, so I spent the few extra $$$ for that as an add-on. I got 6 months of full SiriusXM for the cost equivalent of two months.
What a disappointment. First, the DJs and their endless prattling. I don’t mind them telling me what I heard, or what I’m about to hear, but I don’t need every little story and detail. Second, the poor sound quality was a huge downer. If they need to provide shitty sound so they can give me hundreds of channels, they made the wrong choice. I can put 10,000 MP3s on my USB and play them randomly and get hugely better sound quality. (Unfortunately, the Sony takes almost a minute to read the USB and catalog all the tracks, so that kind of sucks.)
TL;DR: Bad choice by SiriusXM to have both talkative DJs and poor sound quality.
just as an aside, does the branding in your car use the Sirius dog logo or is it labeled/branded “SiriusXM?” if it has the dog logo then it has an older receiver from back before the merger; Sirius used an older codec (Lucent PAC) which has poorer sound quality and today is absolutely falling apart at the low bit-rates required for the number of channels. Anything branded “XM,” “SXM,” or “SiriusXM” should be using the XM receivers/chipsets which use a much more modern AAC-based codec. it’s still not going to be pristine quality thanks to only having ~48 kb/s per channel (variable) but it’s a lot better than the old Sirius PAC receivers.
I’m the same way, although I listen primarily to two stations now - the CNN audio simulcast (on my commute), and Fight Nation (mainly for the Busted Open pro wrestling show). I also used to listen to Entertainment Weekly Radio a lot before it closed in June.
Right now, my six presets on my car radio are Fight Nation, CNN, ESPN Radio, NASCAR, the Beatles channel, and Netflix Is A Joke (the Netflix stand-up comedy channel).
It’s XM, the factory radio in a 2008 Honda CR-V. I’d hate to hear how bad those old Sirius units sounded
This should be a poll. I HATE the yammering. Broadway channel is pretty bad for yammering at times. BPM is pretty bad all the time, especially when they have the Chainsmokers DJing. Chill is better, and that’s my go-to when I get so annoyed by the yammering I have to change the channel.
I changed my mind. This should not be a poll, because I want to vote twice.
I HATE the yammering.
You know what else I hate, when a new DJ comes on, and there is a long (like 2-4 minute) introduction with noise and other non-music. I’m not talking about the 15-second “It’s Showtime on Broadway” jingle, I’m talking about the stuff on BPM where you are listening to it thinking what the heck is this, and you can’t even last the 4 minutes to find out what DJ it is.
I was a big fan of XM radio before the merger, but after they became SiriusXM I left because they started really narrowing playlists and adding more talkative stations. I think it’s fundamental to Sirius’s business model and is really likely to continue, but I also think it’s obvious that a lot of people really like it so it’s not changing.