I was told 3 months when I picked up my Cayenne couple days ago.

 

90 days on my '12 TT. It ran out the other day.

 

I was told 90 days..!

RG

 

All I know is I am 7 months in. Even called XM to find out when it should expire and they could not tell me. Guess I will go until its done and then link it to my other cars accounts.

 

I was told 6 months.

I have one little rant to add.

The service at Sirius/XM is trash, when the companies merged it's like they didn't bother to consolidate their databases. If you call and have both XM and Sirius equipped vehicles, it's a hassle as they have to figure out what is what.

 

Not to mention, the audio quality seems to have seriously gone downhill since they merged. Content seems to have progressively gotten worse over the past year too. I have two cars now, one that is XM equipped and the other Sirius equipped, and SiriusXM won't even give you a discount to equip both cars (b/c diff types of receivers). There have been absolutely no "benefits" to the merger as far as I can tell, when this could've been a really great offering.

SiriusXM is fast on their way to destroying themselves, if you ask me.

 

I can speak to this.
Without getting into proprietary information (I don't want to be traced back and sued by my former employer. God knows they need every dollar of revenue they can get at the moment. ) there were two different compression algorithms used by Sirius & XM.

XM, we used a customized version of AAC+ (basically the basis for today's MP4 standard) provided by Neural audio which was far superior to Sirius who used a custom cooked compression waveform developed by Lucent/Bell Labs.

We all know how "wonderful" telephone audio quality and fidelity is, so why not hire this company to create compression algorithms for an audio music service.

XM had a policy of using less compression per channel depending on programming type (think 64-120kbps for the 5.1 Discrete Channels) except for the Traffic and Weather channels which were crunched down to <20, and we could get away with it because our Satellites were more powerful (Boeing 702s). We had more bandwidth to handle it.

In addition, our chipsets, SDAR receivers, processors and decompression code were spec'd and developed in house. We had our own engineering and innovation staff in Deerfield Beach, Fl. So while you might have bought a OEM install, Sony, Pioneer, Delphi, etc. etc. - the technology inside was developed by XM. Having this all done in house made sure that what went in sounded as good as what came out.


When XM/Siri merged, Siri executed a content rationalization initiative. Talent and programming staff were fired in the droves. Channels merged. And many "live" channels went to automated canned programming. Big mistake.

This mistake was compounded by also driving more compression into the channels - and I'm not sure which they used, but I'm almost certain they are driving it off of Siri's less intelligent algorithm. At this point it sounds as if they're running the channels in the 30-60kbps range.