Radio wave: satellite programming offers something for everyone

Custom Home, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Rebecca Day

Initial home kits are makeshift solutions designed to expand the use of XM and Sirius radio outside of the car. Coming generations of products will be integrated into other product categories including audio/video receivers, boom boxes, and dedicated tuners for custom applications.

This fall Sirius and XM will announce partners for single- and multi-zone products. The latter will allow consumers to tune multiple satellite radio stations at one time and listen to different channels in different rooms of the house. Kenwood will introduce a single-tuner version that will ship in September, and Audio Design Associates is currently shipping a four-tuner XM module that can be daisy-chained to offer 28 zones in total. The companies are making the introductions at the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA) trade show in September, the primary launching pad each year for products in the custom electronics market.

Kenwood's tuner, like more and more components introduced at CEDIA, has RS-232 integration, meaning that it can be controlled by touchscreen or LCD-based panels from Crestron, AMX, and others. In the early days of whole-house audio, homeowners had a choice of a CD player, a couple of radio stations, and a cassette deck, but there were no digital tags attached to the music to label it by artist, genre, or title. You could see that a CD was playing but not which one.

Digital music, however, is coded with lots of useful information. Now that the choices for music have exploded for consumers, having access to 100 satellite radio stations and thousands of MP3 files is only a blessing if they know which song or station they're selecting. The bi-directional feedback made possible by Category 5 communication cable is crucial for next-generation multi-room music products like audio hard drives and satellite radio that store vast amounts of music and channels.

XM is currently working with Neural Audio on technology that improves the dynamic range of the satellite music signal. The next-generation circuitry will improve the quality of current broadcasts and enable high-quality multi-channel surround-sound broadcasts to take advantage of home theater systems. "Why not take XM into the home?" says Phil Whitworth, director of marketing for XM. "Our SKYFi product has had far more uptake than we initially forecast. That's a clear indication that people want better audio content in the home."

Rebecca Day specializes in writing about home electronics. She can be reached at rebecca362@aol.com.