How did a simple question about fringe area radio morph into why someone should pay for Sirus? Satellite radio makes recoverable audio out the speakers, and that's about it. If anyone here that has Sirius has a remotely critical ear, you can easily hear the amazingly poor quality and harmonics of of a simple organ note all the way up the octaves and into distortion. And it will never get better as long as they cram a few hundred channels into a single stream.
I have two Sirus lifetime subscriptions and use them when the mountains tear up the broadcast band, but a replacement for broadcast it's not. Nor is it free