Fried Front Door Speaker Already with 7.1 System :(

FWIW, this is what the 2012 JBL front door speaker looks like.

 

You cannot compare all of HD radio to all of Satellite radio. HD radio has the same sort of compression format over various frequencies (channels). Channel A and Channel B are the same quality, just broadcast at a different frequency. Satellite radio is all broadcast at the same frequency, albeit from space and ground repeaters. They then encode all channels into this one stream. This is how satellite tv works too.

So 200+ channels of sound in 1 carrier versus 1 channel in 1 carrier. Your satellite radio picks out the 1 stream you want to listen to and reassembles the pieces everytime that stream's information pops up in the multi-channel stream. Now if they broadcast everything at high bitrates (HD audio), the frequency would have to be so high it would never make it down from space. Higher the freuqnecy, less the range, and it is not a linear scale.

So they take the popular channels like Hits1, 80's, 90's, some talk programs, and encode them at a high rate that sounds great. The korean news channel however is used by so small a percent of people it is encoded at a really lossy low bitrate. Sports channels not during "big games" are also low encodings. Music channels vary their bitrate depending on feedback on what channels are most listened to and so on.

So if you want to compare, you have to make sure you are comparing apples to apples. The major satellite channels broadcast at the same definition as terrestrial HD radio sound great. The minor channels sound like AM radio, because essentially they are encoded that way to save room for the "more important" channels.