Magnum Dynalab XM Tuner

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discman -- Wed, 04/23/2008 - 19:55

Has anyone tried this? I have XM in my car, but it never seemed very high fidelity. But then again, it is a car.

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Steven Stone -- Sat, 05/17/2008 - 10:05

I've never herd XM from any receiving device that's floated my boat. Their compression-rate is IMHO too high to allow enough music to pass through their pipe. It's the equivalent of listening to music at 64 kbps (or lower) on the internet - not sufficient to keep me involved.

Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications

neil.gader -- Wed, 08/06/2008 - 14:13

discman wrote:Has anyone tried this? I have XM in my car, but it never seemed very high fidelity. But then again, it is a car.
I reviewed the MD 609T XM tuner a few issues ago in TAS. It wasn't perfect but it was often more competitive with a good FM analog tuner than you might imagine. Much depends on the signal/data rate from the originating station but on a good classical or a couple of XM's specialty channels the sonics were truly superior. Dynamics don't quite meet the FM standard and certain low-bit rate stations (usually spoken word) are unlistenable but overall the experience was impressive-especially given the huge amount of content.

Neil Gader Associate Editor The Absolute Sound

neil.gader -- Wed, 08/06/2008 - 14:16

neil.gader wrote:discman wrote:Has anyone tried this? I have XM in my car, but it never seemed very high fidelity. But then again, it is a car.
I reviewed the MD 609T XM tuner a few issues ago in TAS. It wasn't perfect but it was often more competitive with a good FM analog tuner than you might imagine. Much depends on the signal/data rate from the originating station but on a good classical or a couple of XM's specialty channels the sonics were truly superior. Dynamics don't quite meet the FM standard and certain low-bit rate stations (usually spoken word) are unlistenable but overall the experience was impressive-especially given the huge amount of content.

My review was in Issue 180 if you're interested.

Neil Gader Associate Editor The Absolute Sound

JA FANT -- Wed, 10/20/2010 - 04:24

Thanks! Neil.

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