Michael J Santella

B and o system sounds great in Media function but shallow and tinnie in radio function-particularly satellite radio.

I have equalized the sound settings for each but radio still sounds inferior.

Also, I have no dedicated subwoofer option in the MMI display as I do in my 2015 A 3.

Anyone have this experience?

Jay337

All I can say is that I always had problem with Satellite radio's quality and the fact that the B&O is an awesome system make it worst with the ****ty quality of the satellite.

try something, for me now I canceled the satelite and sign up with Spotify.

Spotify's on my cell phone to bluetooth to the truck...awesome quality and WAY more music and feature.

Big D *suspended*

Satellite on B&O is horrid. So compressed. Guy above hits the nail on the head, for talk radio etc, stick with the content of satellite, but for hi fidelity sound, stream from any source through your BT Audio connection.

Michael J Santella

Hard to believe that the satellite radio in B&O is so inferior. Even the HD radio function sounds better.

RobC

It's not the fault of the B&O system. To squeeze in so many channels, Sirius is using fairly low bit rate which results in crappy high frequency response. This is why it's ok for talk radio since the bandwidth of the human voice only goes up to around 3 KHz.

Mrclopec

This! This is correct. Sirius uses very low bit rates. Notice though that certain channels sound better than others? I believe it's because higher profile stations that pay more get to broadcast at higher bit rates. However even the ones with the highest bit rates still sound crappy. It's very misleading when they advertise pure digital satellite radio, implying the quality is going to be amazing when in reality crappy quality can be transmitted digitally too. Side note: I'm surprised Redd hasn't chimed in on this one as its right up his alley. Yooohooo!?!?

Michael J Santella

Good information but it does not explain why the satellite radio in my 2015 A3 with the B&O system sounds much better than the B&O in my 2015 Q5.

I know that the A3 has the latest Audi technology but that still doesn't explain why the Q5 B&O satellite should sound like a transistor radio.

ex-quattro PETE

That's odd. Ours doesn't have B&O, and the satellite music sounds OK - not noticeably worse than radio or a low quality MP3. Granted, it's still heavily compressed, as others already noted, so it definitely has shortcomings, but I would not call it "shallow and tinnie."

BlackSVT

I've had several cars with XM (pre and post merger), and still have one today. The music stations have always been fairly decent in terms of audio quality - much better than FM, not as good as lossless or CD. Listenable in other words IMO

Despite knowing that the Sirius system was always regarded as a little behind, I am still blown away by how bad it is in the Audi. Worse than straight up FM (not HD) and maybe on par with the few AM stereo stations we have here. just horrid compared to what the XM half of the company sounds like.

I really don't understand why they wouldn't just move forward with calling everything SiriusXM but do away with the low bit rate Sirius stuff behind the scenes.

ex-quattro PETE

Since the overall bandwidth is limited, and the company wants to offer a larger number of channels, this results in very low bitrate available for each channel. It is somewhere around 30-40 kbps per channel, last I've read. They use AACPlus (or similar) codec, which is more efficient than a typical MP3 codec, but it's no miracle. Maybe Redd can correct me. The smart thing to do would be to kill off some of the less popular channels so that the remaining channels can have more bandwidth to work with.

I guess Sirius thinks that most of their subscribers don't care about audio quality. They just want some muzak and news blabbering in the background...

Then there is the satellite receiver/hardware component. Some receivers will apply some audio algorithm (glorified EQ) to try to revive low bitrate content, to help artificially fill in the gaps and make it sound fuller. Some of them work better than others. The Audio Enhancer on my home theater receiver actually does a pretty good job at it. I have no idea if the B&O system in the Q5 has anything like this, but if it doesn't and the B&O system in the A3 does, then this could account for some of the differences the OP is hearing.