Hey Dr_JB,

I have a Sirius "Sportster", which is one of the portable receivers. I bought it about 2.5 years ago, and I only use it in my home system. Sound quality is OK, but you can tell it's lossy. We primarily use it for background music in the house when we don't feel like making a playlist. It's on a lot of the time.

Sometimes we complain that the music is repetetive. Of course, that goes for terrestrial radio as well, and perhaps we don't notice the repetition there because we simply don't listen for long periods. Fortunately, when you get tired of one format on XM, you can switch to something totally different.

Between Sirius and my Dish DVR, I really can't tolerate all the commercials on "regular" TV and radio. That's definitely a huge benefit for me and my wife; we just don't do commercials anymore.

So, if you're looking for high-quality audio, XM probably isn't the best choice. I'm sure that the device you pointed to in your original post has better processing and DACs, so I would expect to see an improvement there, but you're still dealing with a compressed format from the beginning. If you are looking for background music and a large selection of formats and tracks, give it a shot. If you don't want to make the initial investment for a receiver, I'm sure you could pick one up on eBay for a reasonable price and just give it a try. Then, if you like it, upgrade the receiver.

Bottom line -- we've been paying $11 a month (or whatever) for quite a while, and never really consider getting rid of it.