Sirius XM MiRGE Review
by blair on Jul.31, 2009, under Daily
Recently, as in last week, I received my new Sirius XM MiRGE radio. I now can receive every single channel on both the Sirius and XM Satellites. A good majority of the channels (mostly music) are the same on both sides, so it really only is for the special channels only available on each side; such as sports, talk, and news. The radio is almost identical to my previous XM xPress RC radio, it’s just a bit thicker and lacks the ability to store 10 songs to play later, oh well. In place of the info button, there is a “Sat” button to switch between Sirius and XM. All in all the radio is the pretty much the exact came as the xPress RC, so I have no gripes about it. The new antenna that ships with the MiRGE is huge compared to the XM antennas I’ve used. I’ve never had Sirius, so large antennas may be normal, but all my XM ones have been quite tiny. I never knew how different the audio quality is between Sirius and XM. Compared to XM, the Sirius channels sound horrible! I can’t believe the compression used. Sirius at times can sound like a low quality Internet stream. It may not be noticable when you can’t compare, but I can’t believe Sirius had so many subscribers with such an inferior audio quality. I’ll stick with listening to the XM side for music, and only sneak over to the Sirius side if I want extra info on the song or to listen to NFL or other specials. Final verdict? The system is great. It’s roughly $20/month for the Sirius XM all in one subscription, but it’s worth it in my opinion.
