I need some help. I have an alpine cda7894, and it says xm ready, my question is how do you get it all to work? I know you have to buy things first, but what, and where is a good deal? Also is xm worth it? I don't have much for fm in my area. Thanks
xm can be great for traveling because of the no lost station problem when you leave your state/city..it will continually play whatever u are listening to wherever u go..is it worth it? i dont know..i guess its what you like..thers no commercials and that but do you think you really want to pay a fee every month for music when you can just play cd's of music that you like..remember when choosing the service you have virtually no choice of what song will play, just really the genre of music and who's to say they will even play songs you can listen to back to back...IMO its up to you and your prefrences..
To get it to work, you must buy a Alpine XM reciever (Or Plug-and-PLay Ski-Fi XM reciever) and an XM antenna. This alone is about 120-160. Than, subscribe for 10 bucks a month. ANd its really only worth it if you listen to the radio alot or are in your car alot. Otherwise, just stick to CDs.
I have had XM for about a year and love it. Go to xmradio.com and you can listen to some of their channels and also see a channel list so you can decide if it is worth $9.99 a month for you (or cheaper if you pay in advance).
Also check out the equipment they have now, you can get a little tuner box and a adapter for most major brand head units for about 100 bucks, and I think this includes an antenna as well. That is why I was holding off getting a head unit (either Pioneer or Alpine) with the XM compatibility as the tuners alone were about 150 bucks, but there is a cheaper solution now.
Also, Alpine does make a head unit with a built in XM tuner but it does not play MP3's what were they thinking? I would have got that in a heartbeat but want the mp3 compatability.
Ah, I see that the Alpine ones come out this month, did not see that. I would check Circuit City on these they are about 5 bucks cheaper there, at least they are for the Pioneers.