Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony DRN-XM01H - XM radio tuner

XM Radio's classical stations contain quite a few annoying "house ads" promoting their service, classical music in general, etc. They apparently don't have much of a budget for creating new ads so if you listen to XM Radio as background music you'll hear the same 30- and 60-second spots hundreds of times. It gets annoying.

Fortunately my Sony receiver failed after a year so I was able to cancel the XM service. Before it failed I found that its cooling fan made a lot of noise and that XM customer service was terrible.

Sony has done better a lot than this. Maybe the DRN-XM01 receiver was rushed to market. Whatever the reason (or excuse), the digital screen with its two tone blue readout cannot be read in anything less than the best lighting, the digital signal suffers from being routed through the car's existing analog system and the remote and presets are extremely limited in function. I subscribed early on and own one because there were few portable units available at the time. This unit is annoying.

This was one of the early first XM units, and it has no extra features that all units have. It has a noisy fan. It has a display that went bad in a year and you can't read it anymore. It has NO built-in FM modulator. You have to use the big 'shark fin' antenna with two antenna cables. It appears to have no buffer as it has more dropouts than my SkyFi unit does. Buy the Delphi SkyFi2 or MyFi instead, do not buy this Sony unit. It's the first Sony item I've ever owned that I was really disappointed with. XM radio I like, but this ancient Sony XM I don't care for.