Posted on 07/04/2007 5:43:20 PM PDT by ml/nj
The only reason I subscribe to Sirius is for their Metropolitan Opera Channel which mostly rebroadcasts old Saturday afternoon performances. Even if you're not an opera fan, you can probably imagine my horror when I clicked to the Sirius site to check out the schedule and saw that the Sunday schedule was preempted and given over to "Live Earth" programming.
I immediately searched for the customer service link and fired off a message to the Sirius folks. I don't have a copy. The gist of it was that I was interested in opera and not left-wing political stuff. Within minutes I got this email from the Sirius folks:
Thank you for contacting SIRIUS. We appreciate the time you have taken to contact us regarding your non-music programming. We are glad to help![ML/NJ], we can understand your frustration of having something other than the preselected programming on your favorite channel. Our programming department selects the channels for preempting, we have no control over what they do. We will forward your displeasure with the programming change to our programming department for their review.
...
I would have quoted and linked the the original Sirius message that talked about the "Live Earth" programming, but it's gone now!
ML/NJ
Ugh. That would have made me upchuck all over the dashboard. Good thing I wasn’t in your car...
I do Sirius via the Internet. (Much better than the car ... I can capture the performances and transfer them to CD's.)
ML/NJ
One of the reasons I will never pay for radio programming of any kind.
Free, or CD/DVD, thankyouverymuch.
That’s very interesting. The Metropolitan Opera advertises all over its web site that it has 24/7 hour programming on Sirius, on its own channel. This is a big project of Peter Gelb, as I’m sure you know. What Sunday was this that the opera was pre-empted? I want to write Peter Gelb a letter. I’m sure the last thing he wants is for the Met to be pre-empted by some political program.
It was to be this Sunday, July 8. I think the Sirius folks may have changed their minds. (But if you do write to Gelb, tell him to please can Juntwait.)
ML/NJ
OH, ick! They’d better not try that with the Bluegrass Channel!
What is Juntwait?
Definitely write to him.
Do you like Sirius, in general? What part of the country do you live in?
Juntwait, or more properly the lamentable Juntwait, is Margaret Juntwait. She replaced Peter Allen as the announcer for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts three seasons ago. Her voice is extremely irritating, and the stuff she says is worse. She directs her remarks to an average intellectual age of nine years old, and averages three superlatives a sentence. She's terrible.
And to make things worse, now that Sirius is rebroadcasting old performances, they have excised the comments of the announcers who did those old broadcasts (Peter Allen, and Milton Cross before him) and replaced them with inane remarks from the lamentable Juntwait.
ML/NJ
I live in NJ. (Duh! ML/NJ. Get it?) But it hardly matters, as I only access Sirius via the internet. The stream is 129Kbps which is borderline acceptable. Sirius does some annoying things like log you off it they don't think you are still listening, but you learn to beat that. Most of the full opera transmissions are plagued with one or two brief digital snafus, which seem intentional to me. (I never, or almost never, get similar disturbances on any other streams I listen to.) But they are offering content which was heretofore mostly unavailable. The audio quality, while not quite as good as it might be, is better than I was able to obtain from FM using an open reel recorder when the original live broadcast occurred in the case or two where the rebroadcasts and my collection have intersected thus far.
ML/NJ
Live Earth -
sponsored by Phillips, who stands to make a MINT on selling CF lightbulbs to the rubes.
Oh, THAT’S Margaret Juntwait. I usually tune out when the commentary comes on. Maybe I’ll ask him if he could substitute some readings from George Bernard Shaw’s music reviews. I don’t think the audience will mind.
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