MR88 Users (and others who have Sirius/XM Radios -- XM Is Free Till Memorial Day

feinstei

AK Member
MR-88 users. If you hookup your XM receiver unit and antenna to your MR-88 and go into Setup (press the Mono button for a few seconds) and enable XM, you can listen for free till Memorial Day. This applies to all Sirius-XM radios....

I think that XM sounds much better on my MR88 than it deserves to due to all the compression that the XM signal is subjected to. The Sinatra Channel and the Bridge channel particularly sound pretty listenable for background music.

I'd appreciate if MR-88 users would post follow-ups to this message giving me your impressions of how XM sounds on the MR-88.

If XM doesn't work, it means that you have v1.00 firmware and should upgrade your firmware to v1.11 (which also fixes a lot of other bugs in both the v1.00 and v1.10 firmware versions). I can provide the v1.11 firmware to you if you PM me (I will send you exactly what Chuck at McIntosh sent me, or you can contact him directly for the firmware). If you do not have a true Intel CPU (for example, an AMD processor) in your Windows XP thru Windows 10 April 2018 (the latest), don't attempt this update -- you will brick your MR88. It can be easily unbricked by simply re-doing the update with a true Intel CPU-based computer.... Other than that caveat, the update is simple to do and very safe (unlike previous updates to the MR-88 which didn't work on anything but XP or Vista).
 
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There are obviously limitations to the sound, but generally I think the sound of XM on the MR88 is listenable. There are some stations where the compression sounds like a very low bit-rate mp3. I'd rather listen to a good XM show w/compression than a local program playing the same 60 classic rock songs every single day. My biggest complaint about XM has been about levels on various stations where the music, announcer and call in users are all at vastly different levels. Some have been to the point of being unlistenable.
 
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