Ear Manna
from Heaven

by Sawyer Brown

Forget all those old gadget problems, all the frustration and the minimal delight once you’ve mastered endless arcane key sequences while always remembering to recharge the batteries every night.

Forget, and, if music is important in your life AND if you spend a fair amount time in your car, proceed at once to the nearest electronics outlet.

Why? Because, If you meet those two conditions (music is important + time in the car), you can purchase yet another gadget, but this one—we guarantee—will enrich your life, give you fuller, lovelier hair, and, depending on your gender either reduce your cellulite or give you firmer, longer-lasting erections.

What’s the gadget? Satellite radio.

Here comes the backstory:

Media Pollution and What to Do About It
The late 20^th century predictions about the coming wonders of cable and satellite TV now of course seem like a sad and sick joke given the vacuous, commercialized content of the 500-channel media paradise we now inhabit.

And modern radio? "Wasteland" hardly begins to describe the AM swamp of "news-talk" radio where "news" means snippets and sound-bites of events mostly spun by the network owners and their political lapdogs, and where "talk" means an endless streams of reptile-brain demagoguery in words of two syllables or less. And why even bother with niche-marketed FM pushing music that this or that mega-corp has a big investment in?

For now there appears to be no way out of the TV wasteland (except maybe Tivo).

But radio escape, into radio as it could have been all along, is now possible.

Imagine turning on your radio and choosing from 100 stations, each devoted to a particular kind of sound: 60 or 70 music stations with for example half a dozen devoted to the various flavors of country, another half dozen broadcasting the different varieties of African-American music, a dozen doing current pop (from mass pop to esoteric), four classical stations, several jazz categories, some good samplings of world music, new age, and so on and so on. WITHOUT COMMERCIALS.

And all with simultaneous text so that all you have to do to find out what’s playing is glance at the LED screen of the radio for title, composer, performer, etc.

Further imagine that this magic radio is available everywhere all the time in North America. No fade in, fade out. No signal break-up. Constant CD-quality sound.

And that’s just the music stations. Throw in 20 or so news and information stations from various commercial sources (CNN, MSNBC, the Weather Channel, etc.) and you’ve entered radio heaven.

Presently, two such services are available: XM Radio, and Sirius Radio. With both you have to buy equipment ($300 to $500) and have it installed in your car, and then pay a monthly subscription--$10 for XM, $13 for Sirius.

That’s it.

Equipment
You have three choices:

1. An add-on tuner. This is a small extra radio that installs in your dash and plays through your existing radio. This is the cheapest route, the only drawback being that the sound is not true CD-quality but sounds only (!) as good as a good FM station.

2. A complete replacement of your present car radio with a unit that has the satellite tuner built in. More expensive but here you get the highest quality sound.

3. A "portable" unit, which can be moved from car to home and back. Not as easy as it sounds and early users in their online comments report various problems.

Esthetic note
A small antenna is required to receive satellite radio. It’s a black plastic box about the size of a pack of playing cards which for best results goes on the outside of the car, either on the roof or the trunk. It can be painted to match the car, but I find my little black bubble, though highly visible, to be extremely cool, an external and visible sign announcing that the occupants of THIS vehicle are in contact with realities not available to other, antenna-less cars.

Why Do It?
We are so conditioned by the broadcast media as we know them that it’s difficult to imagine the beneficial effect of unpolluted, commercial-free 24/7 broadcasts.

I was reluctant for a while, hesitant to insert yet another gadget into my over-gadgeted life. What finally goaded me to do it was the decision of my favorite local public radio station to do a lot less music and a lot more talk—and of course public radio itself is now polluted with "brief" messages from sponsors (now called "supporters").

I didn’t know anyone with satellite radio. I hadn’t heard it, had only read about it, so the choice was a leap into the unknown.

After the installation, in the first five minutes in the car, my automotivated ears were really, really happy, maybe for the first time ever. Happy? They were ecstatic, bathed in a non-stop shower of high-quality audio information pouring like gentle invisible rain from the sky.

Ear manna from the heavens, indeed.

Best of all, though the buttons are small they are few in number, and the device is simple enough that the instruction book is no more than a leaflet.

If you meet those two conditions I mentioned at the beginning (music is important; you spend a fair amount of time in your car), get one. Your ears will definitely thank you. Your loved ones will thanks you, and even other drivers will probably thank you, because you will be a much nicer, more relaxed person.

A typical pre-purchase comment is: Why pay $400 plus a subscription fee for radio when I already have free radio? A typical post-purchase comment is: Knowing what I know now, I’d happily pay even more. (Post-purchasers also remark that 1] they never listen to free radio anymore, and 2] their CD-buying has dropped to nil.)

Is satellite radio perfect? Of course not. Occasionally (very, very rarely actually) you lose the signal momentarily or, in the case of really bad weather, for a longer period.

But this side of angelic realms and the music of the spheres, satellite radio as close to mobile aural perfection as we’re likely to get.