[Rob Hood]

OK, I'm up for renewal on my XM subscription, and I've got free Sirius in my VW Jetta for a few more days. Since sampling the Sirius for the last couple of months, I do like their music selection (classic rock and country stations primarily) better than XM. Both carry the same newstalk stations I listen to as well. I do like XM's traffic coverage better than Sirius' for the Phoenix area, however, although IMO neither does a better job of traffic coverage than the local AM/FM stations. Sirius has NASCAR, but since I'm no longer making 7-hour road trips, that's not necessarily a high priority for me. My XM is portable between my truck and Z, but the Jetta is integral to the OE radio and I would rather be portable (which I know I can get with Sirius as well).

So, who has which one and likes/dislikes? Is it a tomay-to/tomah-to issue? Less filling? Tastes great?

[LT4Firehawk]

I've had both XM and Sirius, and I much prefer the music selection on Sirius. My wife likes the selection on XM better. Basically it's just a matter of what kind of music you like. When I canceled our last XM I told them the reason was because Sirius had a better selection of classic rock, and the guy aknowledged that they had quite a few people site that as their reason for leaving XM.

As to reception, they are both pretty close, but I did notice that the XM units tended to loose the signal more than the Sirius units. This is going over the same exact route, and was repeatable every time and with multiple XM units. Also, the XM units I've had actually had a short burts of "static" when they lost signal sometimes, whereas with all the Sirius units I've had there was never any noise when loosing the signal. Finally, I've also noticed that the actuall sound quality on Sirius seems to be better. Some XM stations are great, but they are quite a few of the music channels on XM that are like listening to an MP3 that's not high quality, like they are compressing the data stream too much.