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      06-13-2013, 03:41 PM   #16
jeffb335
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Drives: BMW
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: California

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FYI, Im driving my wife's above mentioned X5 today instead of my 335.....so while I was driving around at lunch I tuned over to sat radio, turned it up and listened to a bunch of stations....hhhmmm....not good....worse than it used to be I'd say. In general I would say it sounded like a <128kbps pretty much all the time, some stations have that "shimmery" underwater kind of sound that really low bitrate mp3s have. It did vary by station with the top of the dial stations sounding ok, but the more obscure stations sounding fairly bad, and the talk much worse than I remember from my sat radio days. Still fine for my wife, she doesnt care, but kinda rough on my ears.... back to my ipod, ripped all my library at 320kbps.

The cost is just how it is.....the BMW modules are expensive, part of it is because they are old (vehicle design life cycles take a long time so the parts were engineered a long time ago and in the meantime price and size go down a lot). We got a new bluetooth module in the X5 earlier this week to replace a defective one, If I had paid for it, it would have been about $500 for the part, pretty steep considering a cheap chinese bluetooth module can be had in an earpiece for $20 these days....but the module i got is probably a foot long, all metal, weighs a few pounds, and looks like it came out of a tank.....as does the sat radio module for these cars!

Last edited by jeffb335; 06-13-2013 at 04:02 PM..
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