It's a ''must-have for anyone with a car''
What cable did for TV viewers in terms of channel choice and image quality, the new satellite services will for radio listeners, offering vastly more selections and better reception for virtually everyone in Canada regardless of their location.
When XM radio officially launches this week (it and its Sirius competitor have been available on a grey market basis from the U.S. for a couple of years), people willing to buy the hardware (starting at $100 or so) and pay $12.99 a month will get 80 channels with reduced commercial interruption that can be heard coast-to-coast essentially without a gap. Sue Winlaw recently took a low-cost version of the hardware on a test spin from Oshawa to Picton to Markham to downtown Toronto and brought back some impressions and opinions.
Alex: The north-central shore of Lake Ontario's not as isolated as many other places across the country, but it isn't a hotspot for traditional radio, since Toronto and Kingston are too far away to deliver good signals to a car. When I was in Picton once the best thing I could find was a National Public Radio station from Rochester playing a Hare Krishna version of Amazing Grace, and I'm not kidding. What was the XM signal like?
Sue: I was really impressed with the sound of every channel. They were all clear and there was no fade in or out at all, and there was no change from the countryside in Picton to the downtown Toronto towers.
Alex: How many channels are there?
Sue: I think 80, including eight from Canada. Four of them are in English and four are in French. The others are from the U.S., so they're all in English.
Alex: So the choice of music was pretty broad?
Sue: If I wanted to listen to music, there were 12 different categories -- by decade, country, rock, pop, hip hop, lifestyle, Christian, classical and so on) and each of them had from two to 13 channels.
Alex: Any package that offers a choice of music -- "lifestyle" -- that I can't even guess at seems pretty broad to me.
Sue: Those are new age, eclectic/freeform, and the soundtrack from a Starbucks store. There was also a channel called Fungus, which I don't even want to know about.
Alex: Was the hardware easy to use?
Sue: The unit was small so the screen was small, but if you spend some time setting it to the channels you want before you set out, it's as easy as any push-button radio. I flipped frequently between channels 4, 6 and 7 for the music from the 40's, 60's or 70's, and channel 20 for the top-20 hits. You can also buy a remote control device to change and view channels. I imagine the built-in models will be even easier to see and use.
Alex: Right, most of the car companies will be selling XM or Sirius as part of a new vehicle package that's built right into some of their regular sound systems.
Sue: Don't know about the other companies, but GM is ready to go on that now. They say about 50 of their 2006 models -- cars, vans, trucks, SUVs -- can already be ordered with XM radio.
What cable did for TV viewers in terms of channel choice and image quality, the new satellite services will for radio listeners, offering vastly more selections and better reception for virtually everyone in Canada regardless of their location.
When XM radio officially launches this week (it and its Sirius competitor have been available on a grey market basis from the U.S. for a couple of years), people willing to buy the hardware (starting at $100 or so) and pay $12.99 a month will get 80 channels with reduced commercial interruption that can be heard coast-to-coast essentially without a gap. Sue Winlaw recently took a low-cost version of the hardware on a test spin from Oshawa to Picton to Markham to downtown Toronto and brought back some impressions and opinions.
Alex: The north-central shore of Lake Ontario's not as isolated as many other places across the country, but it isn't a hotspot for traditional radio, since Toronto and Kingston are too far away to deliver good signals to a car. When I was in Picton once the best thing I could find was a National Public Radio station from Rochester playing a Hare Krishna version of Amazing Grace, and I'm not kidding. What was the XM signal like?
Sue: I was really impressed with the sound of every channel. They were all clear and there was no fade in or out at all, and there was no change from the countryside in Picton to the downtown Toronto towers.
Alex: How many channels are there?
Sue: I think 80, including eight from Canada. Four of them are in English and four are in French. The others are from the U.S., so they're all in English.
Alex: So the choice of music was pretty broad?
Sue: If I wanted to listen to music, there were 12 different categories -- by decade, country, rock, pop, hip hop, lifestyle, Christian, classical and so on) and each of them had from two to 13 channels.
Alex: Any package that offers a choice of music -- "lifestyle" -- that I can't even guess at seems pretty broad to me.
Sue: Those are new age, eclectic/freeform, and the soundtrack from a Starbucks store. There was also a channel called Fungus, which I don't even want to know about.
Alex: Was the hardware easy to use?
Sue: The unit was small so the screen was small, but if you spend some time setting it to the channels you want before you set out, it's as easy as any push-button radio. I flipped frequently between channels 4, 6 and 7 for the music from the 40's, 60's or 70's, and channel 20 for the top-20 hits. You can also buy a remote control device to change and view channels. I imagine the built-in models will be even easier to see and use.
Alex: Right, most of the car companies will be selling XM or Sirius as part of a new vehicle package that's built right into some of their regular sound systems.
Sue: Don't know about the other companies, but GM is ready to go on that now. They say about 50 of their 2006 models -- cars, vans, trucks, SUVs -- can already be ordered with XM radio.