Satellite Radio vs. Pandora in the car (rental, vehicle, best)

[superseiyan]

So I'm sure most of you listen to something in the car. In your experience, which one is better quality while driving?

Sirius XM

OR

(Paid) Pandora through an Aux input or bluetooth connection.

I feel that the Sirius XM in my car is noticeably weaker than my iPod so I'm wondering about Pandora. I have the free pandora but I understand the paid version has better quality music. However don't know if that quality is good even over bluetooth or whether there is a lot of quality loss during the bluetooth connection. If using phone is it better to use the Auxillary option?

My main beef with Sirius is that increasingly even the music stations have too much talking, and they self-advertise a lot (i.e. as much interruptions as radio except that they're hyping themselves). Maybe it's just the stations that I listen to. But it's still better than radio, but I haven't noticed a significant quality difference over regular radio.

[ukrkoz]

I tried both. Sirius is useless for me.
I have Pandora but it does not cater too good to my taste, so I keep it as backup and didn't listen to it in months.
I stream off TuneIn radio. Very happy.
If you into creating a very good choices custom radio station, go for LastFM. You'll find music options unavailable in the USA as they are GB based. Plus more variety and music available anyway.

[Pyramidsurf]

Sirius is the best. Nothing can even compare to it.

And no, the advertisements are not even close to regular radio. Go listen to an hour of regular radio and sirius back to back. Not even close to the same.

Sirius rarely loses reception, signal all over the U.S., good music stations, and it's reasonably priced. Pandora is ok, but if you drive somewhere with little cell reception it doesn't work. I drove across the entire U.S. and never once lost my Sat reception.

[NewHavensFinest]

Sirius is pretty good. Its a lot more than just radio stations...

My only complaint about Sirius was with a particular unit that was in my old work vehicle.

-Selecting a station was a task with the unit smaller than an Ipod and so it made it hard to cycle through the stations while driving. Pretty sure you can program your own stuff though.


I have been using my Ipod pretty much exclusively for years in my car. My stereo has a direct connection wire that charges and I can select what I want to hear from the Ipod instead of going through the display on the stereo.

Still today, I will burn a few CDs every now and then, or pull out some old discs and enjoy music that way.

[greg42]

I had Sirius for about 4 or 5 years, then cancelled it when I got an iPhone and started getting into Pandora, which was about 4? years ago. I don't know, I first downloaded it when it was pretty new.

I occasionally get a rental car that has the Sirius active, and I don't regret my decision. The available music mixes on Sirius are just too narrow for me. I can switch channels and such but even then I don't find the mix that I like. The stations are too repetitive, at least most of them. That is my assessment anyway. Others may find it perfectly adequate.

I've been paying for Pandora for about 3 years, ever since I started using it enough that the ads got annoying. Paying $36 annually gets you zero ads, more skips per hour and possibly higher quality sound, I'm not sure. It's been too long since I haven't paid for me to remember the details.

There are pros and cons though. A few years ago I drove from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon North Rim. Guess what? No cell service for a big section. No nothing. So we had no music. I'm not sure where we were with audiobooks back then. Normally our fall back these days would be audiobooks. So a pro of Sirius is it works in some very remote places where you won't get enough cell service to run Pandora. Even on my few times a year drive from Pittsburgh to Boston I go through some spots where the patchy cell service makes Pandora stumble a bit.

Another pro of Sirius is additional non-music programming, like live sports, comedy channels, news and talk, etc. Back when I originally signed up I still had a choice of Sirius or XM. I chose Sirius in part because they had NFL games. By the time I let it go I wasn't listening to games that much though. XM had it over Sirius in music as I discovered once back then with a rental car that had XM.

The pro of Pandora over Sirius is the wider music selection, being able to create your own stations, etc. There's also less equipment to buy.

Cons are pretty much as stated already. Con of Sirius is narrowly programmed channels for music, IMO. Non-music stations have a fair bit of commercials, not as much as commercial radio (I don't know how anyone can listen to commercial radio), but still plenty of interruption. Con of Pandora might be how it is controlled in the car. It depends upon your car. Although, this can also be true of Sirius. You may or may not have to buy significant hardware to do Sirius depending upon your car. Sirius is also much more expensive.

BTW, the Sirius signal WILL go out in a few circumstances. In areas where there are no ground repeaters and are at the edge of the coverage, like coastal California, you might have trees blocking your signal sometimes. Also overpasses might momentarily block.

In my old car, I play Pandora through...a cassette adapter! LOL It works great, well, as long as we don't go into EDGE cell territory. At that point you get nasty interference through the tape adapter, just the same way you would if you set an old cell phone down next to a radio (used to happen in the office at work years back). My car has no aux so if not a tape adapter I have to downgrade to an FM transmitter.

On longer trips like that Boston run I'm always in a rental car though, so those usually have some kind of aux. I've been able to try out a couple variations of modern infotainment systems. I've plugged in via regular aux jack, USB, in one case a dedicated iPod connection (VW) and I've used a couple of Bluetooth connections. All work fine IMO. Toyota's implementation with Bluetooth was such that it would resume right where I left off, with the phone in my pocket. I think the GM one did that too in the Chevys. They Chevy even came standard with Pandora integration, but that only worked if you plugged in the USB cable. You would not have access to the thumb up/down controls on the car screen using Bluetooth. Play/pause and skip would still work though, and the title/artist/album info comes through. (That was true on both Toyota and Chevy.) On some trips I find I like to have the phone mounted up on the dash anyway for other app uses, so I don't much care if the Pandora controls are not on the car screen.

In using your phone if you haven't already you might want to spend on some kind of mount, and of course you need to power it somehow.

[PKCorey]

I just prefer XM to having to setup Pandora every time that I get into the car.

[sandlines]

I have weird music tastes and don't care for any talk radio so I prefer Pandora. But I think satellite has certain topics not covered by Pandora. Also, if you drive much in remote places without cell coverage you'll want sat. But I can't find stations I really like on sat.

[MrWillys]

We have 2 vehicles with SiriusXM and our very pleased. We live in the Eastern Sierra Nevada and are very pleased with reception. I use Pandora here in our home, but our phones don't connect to our stereo's in our cars. We're a bit older and probably not tech savvy enough to stream from our phones. I do use them as a hotspot for our netbook, and I Pad.

[Lincolnian]

Doesn't Pandora burn a lot of data if you drive a lot? Sirius is $12 a month or so but data is very expensive. I'm in my car 2 hrs every day minimum. How much data would Pandora use on a monthly basis? I have a 10g plan but just listening to a few YouTube videos will burn 100mgs.

[whiteboyslo]

I prefer Pandora (or whatever music streaming service you prefer) over satellite, but there are trade offs.

PROS:
- $4/mo for premium is cheaper than satellite
- if you don't like the programming, you have no one to blame but yourself. Yes, it can take a bit to get the channel(s) dialed in to what you like, but a little due diligence pays off.
- great sound quality. Much like satellite, it's either there or it isn't.

CONS:
- No cell reception = no music. For those times, I keep some tunes on a USB drive or listen to the ones already loaded on my stereo's internal hard drive

- uses data, although Pandora is no data hog. My wife and I share 6GB/mo, and even though I listen to Pandora all day long at work and then in the car, we don't go over.

- a bit more fiddly to get going in the car. My vehicle isn't new enough to have the Pandora app built in, so it requires firing up the app via the phone. I can pause and advance tracks through the stereo controls, though, which is handy. Changing stations is done via the phone. Inconvenient, but not a deal-breaker

I was a big satellite radio fan for a long time, and while I do still think they have a market (people who spend a ton of time on the road driving through areas with poor cell reception), I otherwise believe streaming is far superior. I, too, found their station selection too narrow in scope and the content very repetitive. They also dropped a few of my favorite stations, which irked me. Also, I could never find a way to stream their content while at work, which means I was ONLY using it in the car. Seeing how I don't have a terribly long commute, it just wasn't worth it.

Mike