By WILSON ROTHMAN
Life is rough. I just spent the last hour listening to XM satellite radio, in the comfort of my own living room. I was tuned into the network's acoustic-rock channel, The Loft. From the Grateful Dead to Alexi Murdoch by way of Warren Zevon and those twin counterrevolutionaries of American music, T-Bone Burnett and Ry Cooder, it was the first riveting music experience I'd had in a while—I didn't dare touch the dial. Good thing I'm not reviewing XM's variety of service, so much as the vessel that carried it so beautifully to my home. Literature that comes with Polk's XRt12 XM receiver states that it is "not a substitute for one's CD player," but that's just modesty. This is the first time I've felt that satellite radio could strike the same emotional chord as CDs or high-quality MP3s.
Satellite radio is essentially the same sort of compressed digital audio as lower-quality MP3s, and Polk claims their high-end converter for turning the incoming digital bits and bytes into analog sound, along with their hi-fi amplifier to get the signal up to snuff, combine to make satellite sound as good as it ever will. The tuner also has two types of digital audio outputs (optical and coaxial) for lining into the latest audio equipment. Lots of companies talk about quality however, so I was skeptical up until them moment I plugged it into Yamaha's CinemaStation DVX-S650 home theater for a test. I was so impressed with what I heard, I settled down for a long winter's listen.
It certainly sounded good to me. I had been expecting the tell-tales of compressed audio: the faint swish-swish-swish, the shaky background instruments, or kind of a weakness in dynamics that are memorably powerful in music formats with stronger, broader signals. The genre of acoustic rock is a particularly good giveaway because acoustic guitars are always the first to sound off. Try as I might, all I heard was great music (which, okay, may have been partly the fault of Cat Stevens and Phoebe Snow).
The coolest thing is that I didn't have to run the antenna outside to get a clean signal. By setting the hockey-puck-sized antenna dish in the window sill, just a few feet from the receiver itself, I was able to get good enough strength. This doesn't mean you'll have the same experience, but it does bode well.
Though it's hard to find fault with the sound of the Polk receiver, there are other aspects of it that don't exactly shine. Literally. The display, a glowing blue on black, is hard to read even when there isn't a glare. You can switch the display to get larger, marquee-style scrolling text, but that's only a little better and far from graceful. The third display option is plugging it into a TV: it works, but it looks pretty awful. Of course, there's no reason to expect exceptional video from a product that's all about audio.
As you probably know, XM isn't free. It costs $10 per month, though if you already have one subscription, your subsequent ones are $7 per month extra. (The big thing for XM are its premium add-ons, like Opie & Anthony on High Voltage for $2 more a month.) Like Polk says, even if you buy the XRt12 receiver, you should hang onto your CD player. Of course, you may never use it again.
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