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XM Radio could be better if they killed about half of the channels. It's just a matter of how much sausage they want to cram into the pipe. When I worked on a
by joezydeco 9y ago
XM Radio could be better if they killed about half of the channels. It's just a matter of how much sausage they want to cram into the pipe.
When I worked on an XM receiver project, I recall they had about 1.5 mbit of bandwidth to work with. Most stations were 16 or 32Kbit AAC+.
The talk stations used 8kbit AMBE, which is pretty much the same as a vocoder. You weren't far off by calling it robot talk.
- toast0 9y agoIt doesn't help that they broadcast everything twice, because some of their older receivers have different frequency ranges from before the merger. I think they could do a lot better if they used their modern position to their advantage. Most receivers are in cars, and many cars are coming with always on internet. Hook up to that and a) report on coverage deficiencies, b) fill in from internet streaming when in poor coverage areas, c) get metrics on listener numbers so things that nobody hears can be dropped, d) use streaming to boost bitrate.