Sirius Vs. Xm..intergrated Vs. Quality Programming

[bkchig]

So, quite a bit of people I know with Lexus' and Toyotas are all debating on getting the expensive xm intergrated kit (if you have nav.) or a plug-n-play from sirius. Well, I have sirius (also, I don't have the nav system) and the programming is by none...far superior. I had a pnp xm commander in my old VW, but man, the selection was nowhere near the selection from Sirius. I enclosed some pics of my setup that took me a whopping 15 minutes to go from shipped box to the enjoyment of sat. music. Also, I for the same price as the xm convertion kit without a subscription, I got the receiver and 1 years subscription to sirius. Here are the pics.

[bkchig]

Here is where I put the ant.

[bkchig]

anybody have an opinion on the setup?

[SW03ES]

Sorry, but I don't care for it at all. The ES has a beautiful dash and I think sticking any kind of aftermarket controller onto it is a real shame. Just my opinion. I definately would have either hidden the PNP somewhere like I did and dealt with the inconvenience or gotten the XM kit. Its too expensive a car to be too concerned about the price of significant add ons IMHO.

[Cutter]

I agree with Steve. The XM add on is superbly integrated into the ML audio/nav system. I also listened to the programming of XM and Sirius on their web sites and found XM more suitable for my tastes.

My only gripe is that the artist and titles are truncated to 10 characters. Perhaps this is something that could be addressed with a firmware update?? I won't get my hopes up.

[SW03ES]

My guess is its because the actual tuner is designed to be used for several applications including add on controllers that have smaller displays. My guess is thats here to stay.

[Cutter]

I did some research on the data truncation issue. Evidently XM channels only transmit 16 characters of content data. Sirius displays 32. The receiver/AV processor further truncates this to 10 characters.

When I play CD-text enabled CD's in the player behind the touch screen up to 30 characters are displayed. So evidently the entire AV system is not constrained to 10 character display. I'm sure this is an academic point since I agree that it is unlikely the issue will be corrected.

I do wonder if anyone has opened up the Pioneer receiver box. Maybe there is a DIP switch that could change this??