Delphi SKYFi SA 10000 XM radio receiver.

Manufacturer: Delphi Corporation, 1441 West Long Lake Road, Troy, MI 48098-5090; 800-GO-DELPHI (463-3574); www.delphi.com

Price: SKYFi SA 10000: $99.99; SKYFi SA 10004 Home

Installation Kit: $69.99

Source: Reviewer purchase

Reviewer: Kevin East

Attentive readers will recognize that I am an unrepentant radio freak, alternately bemoaning the state of on-air programming and cheering on nascent enterprises such as radioparadise.com. So it should be no surprise that it was only a matter of time before satellite radio was imported into Domus Antiquus. There are two national services from which one can choose, Sirius and XM. XM, a fairly sophisticated venture in which some of our corporate favorites, Clear Channel Communications for one, have heavily invested, has stolen the march on the small Sirius, approximately 2.1 million subscribers versus about 500,000. Although the focus of this article is on one of XM's enabling hardware packages, it's instructive to lead you through the decision-making process that resulted in XM over Sirius.

Both services have rabid fans and equally vociferous detractors, all for a variety of reasons. Both offer 120 channels, all commercial free, roughly equally divided between music and news/talk/sports. On the surface, Sirius, apparently aiming at a key demographic, is hipper and ostensibly more youth oriented. However, my search of hardware alternatives revealed that hipness comes at a considerable price. Sirius's enabling home hardware (no, these aren't your run of the mill radio operations--they are satellite operations, which like their TV counterparts require special antennas and tuners) from Audiovox and Kenwood whose tuners are $249.99 and $299.99 respectively. Antennas from makers like Terk, Shakespeare, Audiovox, Kenwood, and Jensen range from $49.99 to $99.99. [Since my equipment shopping venture, Sirius's gear partners, Blaupunkt, JVC, Sanyo, Clarion and XACT, have come out with a slew of more portable tuner options, priced from $99.99 to $149.99.] XM's programming is a tad stodgier but its equipment is all Delphi which offers only the one home tuner, the SKYFi SA 10000.

Let's get one quibble of nomenclature out of the way: both XM and Sirius call their tuners "receivers." I guess that's as accurate as much as it's confusing. After all, they all "receive" satellite signals, but none of them is a conventional receiver: power amplifier, preamplifier, and tuner in one package. Out here in audiophile land, what they offer are tuners, and henceforth tuners they shall be.

My inclination after having read all the promo material on their web sites and listened to a sample of their music programming was toward Sirius, although I wasn't thrilled about the initial equipment investment or the 30% monthly subscription premium, $12.95 vs. XM's $9.99. I was mostly attracted by the rumor that Radio Paradise's signal would be added to the lineup, but that hasn't come to pass. On the other hand, XM boasted ESPN Radio, the only source for major league baseball playoff radio broadcasts, which are seldom aired by the local ESPN affiliate. XM also had two features that Sirius did not: dedicated oldies channels, including one for '40s big band music, and a blues channel. I trotted off to Best Buy with the programming a toss-up and an open mind toward the gear.

What I found was loads of XM equipment and virtually nothing for Sirius: no tuners, a smattering of car and boat antennas, and a couple of mounting kits. Was the Sirius product flying off the shelves, I asked. No, they couldn't seem to get any from the manufacturer. Was this a one-store phenomenon? They called around, it was pretty much the same at the other four (four!) Best Buys in the area. I walked out with the Delphi SKYFi SA 10000 and SA 10004.

Associated Equipment. Since I set the SKYFi up in the home office, it was connected to a pair of PSB Image 2B speakers (Issue 89) through a Harman/ Kardon Festival 60 power amplifier/tuner/CD changer combo unit. (The HK is a neat, tho' quirky, little unit that (a) puts out 35 wpc a side--not bad for an office unit--and (b) was discontinued about a week after I submitted the full review to KWN. Sigh. The quirk, which would have colored the review, was its penchant for emitting a periodic high pitched squeal out of the left channel. When the squeal finally stopped dying out on power-up, I had the unit serviced and found out that virtually all the left channel solderings were either loose or completely disconnected. Whoa. And this on a unit barely 2-3 years old.)

Basics. The SKYFi tuner offers little in terms of specifications except for its diminutive size (4.86" x 2.91" x 1.26") and weight (6.7 oz.). But its very size betrays XM's pedigree and initial marketing niche: commercial free music for the road where radio reception can lurch from one hillock to the next. The faceplate contains all the controls: numbered buttons for keying in a channel by number, a category search if you want to stroll through any particular genre, say, country or jazz, the preset/direct button, an A/B switch which toggles between two banks of ten presets each. A memory switch saves what's on the display for later recall, a display button changes the format, but not the content, of the five-line faceplate display, and a menu button accesses the tuner's set-up configuration, although once you're up and running, you won't need this. Finally, once you're in a submenu--say, a genre or a bank of presets, you can use either the up and down arrows or a jog wheel to move around. The remote control is equally teensy (1.5" x 4.33" x .79") and pretty much replicates the face panel controls, except that in place of the menu button, there's a mute button.

Well, gee whiz. Is that all that teeny tiny tuner does? In a word, no. The SKYFi can be connected to a car audio system (with a separate installation kit also for $69.99) and can be toted around in its own custom made boom box ($99.99). There's even a marine adapter ($200). But they all accommodate the same dinky little tuner and remote. Once you've got the account and the tuner, you can pretty much move it to wherever you want.

Setup. The SA 10004 Home Installation Kit contains a cradle for the SKYFi, a mini-jack-to-RCA stereo Y-cord, and an indoor/outdoor antenna. Setting it up is Phase 1, and it's pretty simple. Plug in the cradle, seat the SKYFi in the cradle, connect the antenna to the cradle, connect the mini-jack cable to an open auxiliary port on the Festival 60. You position the antenna so that it has an unobstructed view of the southern sky--just like satellite TV--and fiddle with it until you get 3/3 bars on the signal strength meter on the SKYFi's display.

Phase 2 consists of activating your subscription (no minimum) and service (almost too easy at www.xm.com). Once you've input the descrambling code, you go through a couple of tests, wait about five minutes, and what channel did you want to try first?

All in all, set-up took less than half an hour including resolving two, er, "user" glitches. First, I didn't seat the SA 10000 firmly enough in the cradle. Ordinarily, this should not be too tricky an operation, but I found a firm-but-not-too-firm snap of the tuner into the cradle was in order. Second, the mini-jack plug must be very firmly seated in its receptacle or of course you won't get any sound. In this instance a reallyfirm snap is the order of the day.

Play. What's there to say about a radio? With a satellite rig, there's no worry about analog artifacts like capture ratio and channel separation--the digital signal carries all the information--or the ability to pull in weak signals: all the channels are carried on the same signal. And a review of this kind of dedicated equipment necessarily involves a review of the service it carries. So there are two sets of judgments in play: the carrier and the carried.

First, the carrier. The Delphi SA 10000 and SA 10004 were as easy to set up and get going as almost anything I've had around, not the paragon of "plug-and-play," but very close. If there's any issue with the overall character of the XM signal, it's weaker than a conventional FM signal. In other words, even at full strength, you've got to crank up your preamp's volume to get the XM signal to minimal listening levels. This also means that when you switch to another sound source, you should make sure to back it off. The quality of the signal, however, is excellent. Once the antenna was in place, the signal's rarely wavered. Oh, there's the usual electrical storm interference, but those are temporary phenomena. All in all, there's little to belittle.

Now, the programming is a bit different. Cruising XM's 60 music channels is a bit like cruising a major metropolitan FM band ... except, there are no commercials, save for XM's endless self-hype, and there are more genre selections than in even a fairly large open market. For instance, XM's jazz complement includes separate channels for contemporary, trad, and modern jazz as well as American standards and blues. It used to include Latin jazz, which was moved to the Hispanic programming menu, and what they called the "Cocktail Mix"--the ubiquitous jazz lite, which no longer exists. In the metropolitan Washington DC area, there is only one jazz lite station, one station which carries a mix of jazz and blues, and that's about it. So XM already offers alternatives that the marketplace does not. A bluegrass only channel? Three classical channels? Heaven.

XM also includes special programming on a regular basis. For example, tomorrow night--being September 7th--one channel will play all 54 tracks of 1990's Led Zeppelin Box Set and without commercial interruption. If your rig is set up correctly (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), you've got the Led Zeppelin Box Set recorded on your hard drive in a jiffy. Don'cha lo-o-o-ve technology? Now, I've got all the Led Zep stuff, so I'm not tempted, but every week XM's programming email lets me know what's going to happen.

Finally, on the non-music side of the ledger, XM offer a host of networked news and weather (CNN, Fox, ABC, CNBC, ESPN, the Weather Channel, and so on) as well as a variety of live sports programming and around-the-clock traffic and weather for selected metropolitan areas. Round this out with a bunch of talk channels and a couple of nods to radio whimsy: old time radio, audio books, and new radio drama, and you have an interesting melange of listening opportunities. Although the longer programs, just like their theater/live event counterparts, require some judicious advance planning, I can imagine that satellite radio, in this instance XM, is a nigh perfect tonic for long drives into the middle of the heartland.

The flip side to satellite radio in the car used to be the sheer adventure of finding radio stations, especially the quirky high wave AM stations that seemingly bounced off the moon. And I suppose for some it still is. The flip side corollary was that eventually you'd lose that station that was so engaging, perhaps never really knowing if Matt Dillon survived this week's villainous confrontation. Of course you knew, but the built-in uncertainly was that you hadn't actually heard it. Still, I guess I'd rather have a choice, especially if my RAV4's radio will only pull in static or a bunch of stuff I'd rather not deal with. I'm secretly hoping that XM will find a way to license baseball radio broadcasts, the pluperfect nostrum for a long drive on a hot summer's night.

Conclusion. XM offers what I'd bargained for and a little more. It's added Pac 10, ACC, and Big Ten football and basketball broadcasts to its line-up, not a bad pull to a household with grads from the Pac 10 (Cal) and Big Ten (Michigan State) and is plop in the middle of ACC country. It still offers ESPN radio and the MLB playoffs, and enough musical variety that I feel like the up-front costs and the $9.99 monthly fee is still are decent investments. The proof of this particular pudding will be how much we listen to it after five years and $600 in subscriber fees. We'll let you know. For the nonce, I'm enjoying XM Radio and can't find a scintilla of fault with the Delphi SKYFi SA 10000 radio or SA 10004 home installation kit.--KE