Surveying the soundscape.

Radio Days: I remember fondly the Bar M western ranch set from the Marx toy company. The great thing about it was its utter completeness. It came with cowboys, animals, fencing, the ranch arch and gate, a well, trees, cacti, the ranch house, furniture, and more. A kid who got one of those sets opened up a box of comprehensive fun. There'd be no letdown because something wasn't included.

Unpacking Delphi's MyFi satellite radio took me back to the ranch. Absolutely everything anyone might need to experience XM Radio's service was there. With MyFi's exhaustive complement of accessories, you can use it to hear XM Radio on your car stereo, through your home audio system, and on the go as a personal portable.

The car application is the most obvious (and most publicized) use for satellite radio reception. So I arranged to have my review sample arrive just before starting on a 2500-mile road trip. But I did have time to try it out for a couple of days at home before leaving.

I got out the home accessories: the AC adapter-battery charger, the Y-connector to feed the RCA jacks on the preamp, the home antenna, and the docking station that holds the MyFi and provides connection points for the other items.

It was a bit tricky getting the MyFi operating properly that first time. To start with, there was a lot of wire to deal with. The antenna, in particular, has various yards attached to it. You need a strong XM signal for best MyFi performance and those signals come from a southerly direction. A long lead allows considerable flexibility in antenna placement.

Delphi recommends a south-facing window as a good antenna location. I didn't have that available and my first attempt at antenna placement failed utterly. Fortunately, I did have a south-facing wall available, one with no adjoining room. When I unwound enough wire to pin the antenna to that wall, I got good reception. (Sounds kind of like the old crystal set days, doesn't it?)

The MyFi then presented me with another challenge. It wouldn't change stations. I found a temporary workaround: turn off the unit and retune. That trick was only partly successful. I noted that the content information display never changed. If "Stardust" was playing when I turned on the unit, that's what the display would read forever. Well, if not forever, at least for the 2 1/2 hours when I went out to dinner and left the MyFi running.

The cure was simple enough. The manual mentioned a hard reset that would force the MyFi back to a factory fresh state. I applied the procedure and everything worked perfectly from then on.

While I had the MyFi playing through my home system, I paid more attention to audio quality than to MyFi's operating functions and XM Radio's channel lineup. I'd get to those when I was on the road.

In the musical fidelity continuum, the sonic performance was somewhat better than MP3 audio but not quite as good as FM radio. Since I've had no substantive experience with other XM Radio receivers, I can't be absolutely certain whether the MyFi hardware or the XM Radio signal is more responsible for the so-so sound quality. My guess is that the MyFi is fairly accurately passing along what it snags from the satellites and that the processing necessary to shoot 180 channels of digitized sound into space and back might well have a adverse effect on audio quality.

Setting the MyFi up for in-car use is similar to the home system setup. There's a cradle rather than a stand to hold the MyFi and three different mounts to hold the cradle. A magnetic antenna about the size of half a walnut goes on the outside of the vehicle, a cigarette lighter adaptor provides power and keeps the internal MyFi battery charged, and a cassette adaptor to feed the MyFi's audio signal into the car stereo.

That's the one chink in the MyFi's armor of completeness. More and more car systems these days don't include cassette playback capability. MyFi does have a built-in FM modulator that you can set to feed an unused FM frequency to your car receiver. But it doesn't work any better than any of the other FM feeds that I've tried. The MyFi manual is very frank in listing that signal transfer method at the bottom of the quality scale.

In fact, I'm going to advise against considering a MyFi (or any external car stereo add-on) if the only way you have of getting an audio signal into your car stereo is by FM modulation. It's the equivalent of using a modulator to convert a DVD player's audio-video signal to channel 3 as a means of getting it into your TV receiver. The loss of quality is tremendous.

An alternative for a cassette-less car installation (and sonically the best choice in any case) would be to run a cable from the MyFi to an AUX input on the car receiver. Those inputs are becoming more common in aftermarket autosound head units. Some even have the AUX inputs their front panels. You'd have to supply your own cable for that, however.

Once again, there's a lot of wire involved in the MyFi hookup. And in a car cockpit, it can be quite obtrusive. My solution was to bundle up as much of it as I could and close it inside the glovebox: not elegant, but effective.

Operationally, the MyFi really came into its own in the car. First off, the unit was close enough to allow easy viewing of the information display. I found the MyFi's front panel controls very well laid out and easy to adapt to. There's even a remote control which I didn't expect to make much use of in the car, but which proved a handy adjunct for many common operations.

At this point, I should mention, as usual, Mrs. K did most of the driving on this cross-country trip. That meant that my investigations into the operation of the MyFi and the XM Radio offerings didn't (directly) interfere with vehicle control.

An auto collision shop operator once told me that a great deal of his business was due to mishaps that occurred when people's attention was distracted by trying to work with unfamiliar radios in rental cars. Even though the MyFi controls are spectacularly well planned and arranged (both on the unit itself and on the associated remote), I'd advise devoting some time for familiarization with the basics of its operation before hitting the road with you as both car driver and MyFi jockey.

Operating MyFi is pretty easy. XM Radio's neat layout of its stations helps a lot, particularly the "greatest hits" channels that are set up by decade. Channel 4 gets you the '40s, channel 5 gets you the '50s, and so on up to the '90s. Those channels, and all the rest of the 100 or so XM music channels, are 100 percent commercial-free. But XM's music presentation differs significantly from that of the music channels that come with satellite TV and digital cable subscriptions. XM, after all, is radio. The music channels have disc jockey announcers who deliver very familiar spiels between songs or groups of songs.

You'll also hear typical radio jingles, station promos, and special event promos between music sets. The pop channels accept call-in dedications, too. And if you tune to one of the non-music channels (comedy, news, sports, commentary, traffic, weather), the commercial-free policy may not apply.

The XM music selection is quite varied on all the channels, sometimes overly so. On the decade-oriented stations, they often dig right through the bottom of the barrel for song selections. I guess if you're a total freak for the '70s, for example, you might find XM's excursions into pop arcana rewarding. Someone with only a casual interest in any of the 10-year blocks is going to do a lot of station hopping.

I did pretty well with my search for jazz-oriented listening. I could hear some on the '40s channel, some on Frank's Place (mostly vocals by Sinatra and similarly oriented crooners and warblers), quite a bit on the various Latin music stations, and plenty on Real Jazz. The Beyond Jazz channel (XM's "brave, cool world") was disappointingly bland. It was no more "brave" than what I heard on XM's Watercolors channel for smooth jazz.

Missing from XM are stations featuring older jazz (Beiderbecke, Morton, Oliver, Armstrong, Ellington, Henderson). That lack didn't surprise me. But I was astounded not to find a big band jazz and swing station. All the digital music services that I've run into from TV satellite and cable providers have swing era channels.

You'll find classical music on three stations: XM Classics (full performances of symphonic, chamber, solo, and choral works), Vox (vocal performance), and XM Pops (symphonic excerpts and light classics).

Country music is well represented and well organized. I paid quite a few visits to America ("the true sound of country"), Hank's Place (traditional country), Bluegrass Junction, and The Village ("folk music lives ..."). You might prefer X-Country ("greasiest, grittiest sounds from coast-to-coast"), Highway 16 ("today's top country hits") or others.

The preceding paragraphs constitute nothing more than a surface scratch into XM's bundle of a hundred or so stations. Most XM subscribers will assemble their own preferred "scratches." You can get started on yours by checking out the detailed listing on XM's website (www.xmradio.com). Some other categories to check out include Rock, Christian, Urban, Lifestyle, World, and Kids.

XM also serves up news, talk, comedy, weather, and sports. XM stations that carry non-music content are not necessarily "100% commercial-free," not even MTV Radio.

Getting back to the MyFi kit, there's one more listening option included. It's the personal one. You can plug a set of headphones (included, of course) into the MyFi and use it in Walkman-like fashion. You will have to plug an antenna into it, too. The antenna is discreetly compact and clips to an available article of clothing.

For me, this was the least useful and least attractive MyFi application. I found that as I strolled around or sat myself down, I often might not be in a spot where XM's southern sky satellite feed had a clear shot at the MyFi antenna. (That happened in the car from time to time, too. Stopping on the north side of a building can cause a temporary loss of XM reception.)

I figure that's one of the reasons that the MyFi includes a memory mode that can store up to five hours of XM content for later playback. I didn't try out the memory feature, partly because there was no XM station that I'd want to listen to for five hours straight.

Now for the economics of the whole thing. The MyFi list for about $300, down from an original MSRP of $350. You might find it for as little as $250 online and when checking out pricing, I spotted a MyFi Life for $125. That one leaves out the car and home accessories. You use it as a portable only.

In comparison, you can get a Delphi Sky-Fi for around $100, but that's the receiver only. You'll need a car kit or home kit (each about $50) or a boombox dock (about $100) to make it work. So the MyFi bundle is a pretty good deal.

For any of these (and for the competing Sirius satellite radio system), you'll need to add the subscription fee. That's $12.95 a month. You can get that down to $9.99 a month by prepaying a subscription for 36 months or more.

The big question, of course, is how well XM's programming will satisfy your listening requirements in the car, at home, or personally on the go. For me, the home and personal applications had no appeal. The car application was fun for a while, but it was more the novelty than the aesthetics that held my attention. The novelty faded with time and distance.

I did not have the MyFi installed for the 2,500-mile return trip and I found that I didn't feel like I was missing a thing. I have an Adobe Acrobat file of NPR stations on my palmtop and various tapes and CDs handy in the vehicle. Those quite nicely quenched any thirst for on-the-road listening.

Sonny Days: A preview copy of Sonny Rollins's Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert) arrived the other day. It's been in heavy rotation on my CD player ever since.

As the subtitle points out, this is a live recording of a performance by Rollins. It took place in Boston at the Berklee Performance Center just four days after the attack on the World Trade Center. Rollins had considered canceling the event. His wife and manager, Lucille, overruled that idea and

Rollins motored to Boston to make the gig.

Not only did he play the concert, but the performance was recorded. By the time you read this, it should be in the stores as Rollins' 22nd Milestone release and his fourth Milestone live session.

It's one of the most exciting of Rollins' recent recordings. Rollins says the presence of an audience "... gives me a different thing to play for, which always enhances what I'm doing." His various in-performance recordings bear this out. (In addition to the four live Milestone dates, Rollins performed live on recordings issued by Blue Note, RCA, MetroJazz, and Atlantic.) They rank high in his work and high in the pantheon of all live jazz performances captured for posterity.

Without a Song is one of the less polished and more emotional of the Rollins live sessions. It has a cinema verite character. The technical quality of the recording is far below that of, for example, the "Our Man in Jazz" date for RCA in the '60s. But either in spite of or possibly because of the odd mike balance, the roughness of the piano sound, and occasional odd noises, there's a strong impression of being there. And that sense of reality underscores and strengthens the visceral impact of Rollins' spontaneous creativity.

His band mates (Clifford Anderson on trombone, Stephen Scott on piano and kalimba, Bob Cranshaw on electric bass, Perry Wilson on drums, and Kimati Dinizulu on congas and African percussion) are as fired up on this occasion as Rollins is.

Scott dips into his Monk bag without sounding like a copycat. Dinizulu contributes not only percussive highlighting, but also stylishly conceived and executed conga solos with considerable jazz feeling. Anderson boots out solos with the energy and elan of a latter-day Al Grey. Cranshaw, after more years with Rollins than either might care to count, matches the master's every sensibility, binds the group together, and contributes impeccably appropriate solos. Percy Wilson lifts and drives throughout.

The tunes are mostly standards: "Without a Song," "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," "Why Was I Born?" and "Where or When." The one original is "Global Warming." All have been put on disc by Rollins before. But these live versions are more expansive and intense than any earlier recorded instances.

It's tempting to attribute the impact of these performances to an understanding of their historical placement. Certainly Rollins felt the weight of the preceding tragedy (which occurred only blocks from his Manhattan residence) and knew the release that music can provide. The audience also was clearly ready for the healing and hope that the evening promised. Boston, after all, had a major place in the events of 9/11.

On the other hand, this music would sound as uplifting, energetic, satisfying, and inspiring even without the listener being aware of surrounding circumstances.

Rollins, after all, is Rollins.

--TK