So I just picked up my '07 G yesterday and playing around today I was completely unimpressed with the sound quality of the XM sat radio. FM sounded better. MP3s ripped at 128 sounded better. What gives? I thought SAT radio was supposed to be much higher quality than OTA?

 

This is the dirty little secret of satellite radio (both XM and Sirius)--although people expect digital to mean CD quality, the streams are extremely compressed so that they can squeeze in as many channels as possible. As a result, there are a lot of digital artifacts, and in many cases the sound quality is sub-FM.