SIRIUS is a viable alternative to radio in a vehicle. It just depends on what you want out of it. It is not the highest audio quality as it uses codecs (along the lines of MP3 but not that good) to compress the Bandwidth so they can get all those channels on a fixed bandwidth satellite. They even have to take from all talk channels to give to the music channels. I do not mind the audio quality at all as that is not my objective with SAT Radio, rather I just want to be entertained. IMO the content more than makes up for the short comings of the actual audio quality.