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The screen is very bright, especially when it's dark or cloudy, and very intuitive right out of the box. I have the Sirius lifetime subscription for the unit and feel like it'll make it for many years to come.
If you get the boombox, I'd suggest hooking it up to a better antenna. I actually purchased an additional low profile car antenna for the boombox (the same kind attached to my car), and it works great.
I've had this unit now for 3 years and have enjoyed using everyday. I've toyed with the idea of buying another/backup Calypso in the event mine goes out.
I had the car adapter installed prefessionally and purchased the boombox when I got the radio back in 2005.Since I listen to Sirius everyday, the Calypso's had plenty of use. I even dropped it once in my garage and it never showed any signs of faltering.
but it doesn't seem like it will, so I'll just hold off.Overall, a great purchase.
It died after only a day or two. I had to send it back to Clarion to have it replaced which they did, but I was without the radio for like two weeks. I have had the Calypso (actually 2, one for me and one for my wife) for over a year now and they both work great. Since then, I have had no problems. I think it is worth the money if you want a good radio. I had a problem with one when I first received it. I wound up buying the Sirius lifetime subscription because I am confident the radio will last a long time.
My only complaint is that the lights are out on my unit. It still plays, but I can't see anything on the screen or any of the buttons at night. Clarion will repair it, but that means I will be without it for 4-6 wks. I bought this unit, the car kit and the boombox last January. The sound is great, the installation in the car was easy. That sucks.
It was truly painless and hassle-free.Now I don't have these magical wonder-ears that can hear tiny, minute details in music and audio. My average hearing, probably less-than-stellar from years of noisy factory work has played a roll, but to me the sound quality of the satellite radio sounded just fine on the music and talk channels. This unit has a very solid feel, and good looks to match. The display is bright, clear, and stylish. I can say it was better than FM, because there was no static, no fading in and out, just a solid clean signal. All of the buttons have a nice solid feel, and are backlit for ease of use in poorly lit environments. If there were any compression artifacts to be heard, neither myself nor anyone I know who has listened to it has been able to hear anything but a clean, smooth signal.
After placing the antenna and aquiring a signal, the unit was ready to be activated. Only when moving the antenna and coming close to losing the signal did the sound start to garble and become "digitized" sounding.This unit runs quite cool compared to other units. It gets slightly warm to the touch, but has never gotten hot enough to be uncomfortable to handle. Clarion continues it's legacy of high-quality products with the Clarion Calypso. Just a few minutes completing the online activation/registration forms on the Sirius website, and my subscription was confirmed and my radio was activated just moments later. The hardest thing about setting this thing up is removing it from it's herculean-strength blister hang package. After cranking up the chainsaw and freeing it from it's near permanent encasement, I was able to set the unit up (with the home-kit purchased seperately) in a matter of just a couple minutes.
The remote is easy to grip and use, but I am not fond of the button layout, but that is just personal preference.I am very happy with my purchase, and if I had to do it over again, I'd make the same purchase without hesitation.
The call wait was *very lengthy* - maybe 1/2 hour. Some channels work better than others, for reasons I can't explain. In my area, there are very few open channels, but I was able to find 5 pretty good ones. I recently bought this radio after returning a JVC Sirius receiver because of poor sound quality.
All in all, I thought that the radio and the service was probably worth having for such a long trip. I was very glad for the 30 preset buttons on the Calypso (as opposed to as few as *3* for some other units) to prevent having to tune with the tiny channel selector knob. The unit is nicely made and works fairly well. This may be related to another fact I noticed - the unit get remarkably hot in use.
It's not that easy to find a place to mount the receiver and the supplied mount is essentially useless. It was very easy to set up the first time, except for the mounting -in the car, in this case. Maybe 5 minutes total. But the audio quality is barely tolerable at best, the receiver is fairly fiddly operate, and it gets unnaturally hot. The talk channels are of telephone quality at best, and the compression artifacts gave me a headache after listening for an hour or so. The "talk" channels don't even get up to the quality of AM radio.
These are typically music channels. But it was at least straightforward to pick a subscription package and get it working. I noted some addtional thing about this. I have found it somewhat too easy to accidently press the button (invoking the direct-tuning function by default) when trying to turn it. It functions fine, but it's just a magnet mount on the roof of the car, with no good way to make it permanent and to dress the wire neatly.
The mounting of the antenna is simple enough, but the unit itself takes up a fair bit of space and it not that easy to place without getting in the way of something. Overnight, in the cool, and it took a few minutes to work. Worse than a good FM station by far. For the good stations an 80 Kbps MP3 format is a good representation of the sound quality. It's no less programmed than the average FM station as near as I can tell. The better channels on Sirius are more-or-less acceptable, with MP3-quality sound. This isn't very good to start with, but some of the channels have even more compression. I had plenty of opportunity to compare the same source material on AM radio and Sirius talk channels and there was no comparison - a good AM station was FAR better.
I can't imagine how hot it would get outdoors. Its definitely temperature, not any other effect, because it could stay off for 12 hours in the HOT car and it would work right off. It turned out right away, but the reception was non-existent. Fox News Channel audio, and ABC News Radio were welcome because of the variety - but then there's that poor audio quality so you can't listen for long without fatigue. Of course, the beauty of the system is that you pretty much always get the same quality. Once everything got going (see below), it was dead solid in reception, only dropping out for a total of about 10 seconds on a roughly 5000-mile highway trip - the four times I passed through tunnels.
I must have heard the same 5 AC/DC songs 20 times in 3 days on "Buzzsaw", and it seemed to be pretty similar for the other channels, even the Jazz channels where you would think there would be 100 years worth of things to choose from. This even in a comfortably air conditioned car. I think it's functioning correctly, but I am somewhat disappointed with the quality of the sound. On the better channels, it's acceptable, but everything sounds a bit like it's begin transmitted from an echo chamber. (addendum) I recently took a long car trip and used the Calypso receiver extensively.
I was surprised at how often this was required, but I guess that driving down I-80 and ~80 miles an hour, you run across a lot of FM stations in a hurry. But there are so many channels that you can usually find something worth listening to. Overall, it's acceptable, but it's really nothing to write home about. I was however amazed that the unit took several minutes from a cold start to begin receiving a solid signal. It just sort of flops around up there. The FM modulator function worked pretty well. So hot to the point it was somewhat painful to touch, and I thought the plastic might melt.
I had to resort to switching from regular air conditioning to "defrost" to get cold air to blow on it periodically (it's mounted near the side window defrost outlet). I speculate that the frequency standard is heated above ambient to provide the necessary repeatability, and that heating is making the entire unit run very hot. I think it took longer to open the package (no mean feat) than it did to hook it up at least well enough to turn on and get functioning. By far the nost suspect aspect of the car installation kit is the mounting of the antenna. It's more like a mediocre telephone call.
If you are expecting CD-quality sound, you are in for a big surprise. The programming on each channel can be quite repetitive. You have to call Sirius to activate the unit, and it has to be on when you do it. Its nowhere near as good as a good FM station. The only fiddling I did was to change the FM transmitter frequency. the know is just a little too small for my fingers, and has no knurled grips or anything like that. I couldn't find a good equivalent for the talk channels - somwhere in the 8-12 Khz range WAV is as close as I could get.
I can't fathom how that could be the case with solid state electronics, aside from maybe the frequency reference being temperature-controlled. I played around with audio CDs and various encoding speeds and methods to recreate the sound quality.
The Calypso is much better in terms of sound quality - but, that's not really saying all that much. I have mostly used this unit in the car, using the FM transmitter, but it sounds pretty much identical hard-wired to my home hi-fi system.
The main adjustment is with a knob that both rotates and is a push-button. First, the sound is even worse than I initially thought.
This unit can transmit on any of the FM frequencies, which is an improvement over a lot of the competing units. I ended up putting the unit on the A-pillar of my van, but had to make a custom mount for a clean installation.
I have to admit to some disappointment, overall.
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