This describes my recent disappointing service experience at Crestview Cadillac, in Rochester Hills, Michigan. I have a 2006 CTS with the 18" wheel package and Bose sound system. I had always noticed that XM radio reception was not "digital quality". In fact, it had a constant "air noise" that is very perceptable while listening to talk stations and seems to dull the quality of music stations. I would say that it is similar to the "white noise" many people find in office buildings.

I took it to Crestview Cadillac in Rochester, Michigan to have the oil changed and wheels rotated. As long as I was there, I told the service advisor of the poor quality of the XM radio. The service advisor listend and clearly heard what I was experiencing. The CD and FM bands were much more clearer than the XM. He scheudled me to bring the car in the following week. After being in the shop all day, the service manager, Joe Girouard, called and told me there was nothing he could do. He could not diagnose the root cause.

When I returned he simply dismissed my complaint. Since he did not know how to fix the problem, he told me that there is nothing wrong with the sound quality. He walked away from me, saying "I do not have time for this". One of the service techs mentioned that he had heard similar complaints, so the manager could not argue that there is an issue. He agreed to research it further, and promised to get back in touch the following week. But he did not keep his word to research this matter, nor did he call me back.

Since then, I have escalated the issue through cadillac customer service, requesting to speak directly with the zone manger. But the zone manager wants nothing to do with this. He would not even call me directly, rather he had the Cadillac customer service rep, Ryan Keene, tells me that the zone manager agrees with the service manager and there is nothing wrong with my XM. He said that it is "due to the decoding of the digital signal".

I stopped by a Lexus dealer and sat in a new ES, it's XM radio did not have the same air noise. I also spoke with XM radio, and they informed me that the problem is with the equipment. If if it functioning properly, it should be "digital quality" as advertised by GM. Yet, the customer service hotline rep, Ryan Keene, told me that XM is not digital quality and what I am experiencing is "normal". He refused to pass on my invitiation to the zone manager to meet a real Cadillac customer, who just dropped $40K on one of their vehicles, and listen to XM radio on the drive to a Lexus dealer, where we could sit in an ES and listen to the same station. I was told that it is an unreasonable request, and aparantly it is an unreasonable expectation that XM radio perform as advertised on my $40k car.

I later found out from one of my students that the real problem is that the XM receiver is not hard wired into the system, rather it plays on a weak FM band. The fact that my wheels have the tire pressure monitors, sending a signal to the information center, may also interfer with this weak FM band. Basically, he told me that GM found a quick and cheap alternative to hardwiring the XM, and therefore the quality will never be "digtal" as advertised. So Cadillac and the dealer have been giving me the run around. To top it all off, I just discovered that Crestview forgot to reset my tire pressure monitors when they rotated the wheels. I guess they did not even have time to do this right for me.

My wife and I are planning on purchasing a new vehicle this fall, and we were looking at Cadillac, Lexus, and BMW. I am begining to think that I will go back to my vow to never buy an American car again, especially after being treated like this. The SRX is falling looking less apealing all the time just because of the poor service from Crestview Cadillac, Cadillac Customer Service, and the zone manager from Cadillac.

If you're in this area already and want to see a truly great dealer, check out Erhard BMW in Bloomfield. It's at the SE corner (I think SE, will edit post later if not) of Maple Rd. and Telegraph.

This isn't the first resoundingly negative thing I have heard about Crestview. You might want to check out Suburban Olds Cadillac in Troy or Rinke Cadillac in Warren for a better service experience.

I was at Crestview some information for a head gasket issue (I don't have the facilities to remove the engine on an Eldorado). I was told that as a matter of policy, they will not do engine work on a car with over 100000 miles, but they would be happy to sell me a new engine for around $8000 plus installation, estimated at $1600, or a rebuilt engine for $6000 plus installation. I couldn't believe the idiot service man could keep a straight face while telling me this.

As far as your radio, "digital" is not a quality standard. A perfect phonograph recording of a piece of music played on a decent player through a decent system will easily exceed the quality of a digitised recording of the same music played from a CD (44100 16-bit samples per second per channel) on the same system. The problem you may have, I believe, is that on many GM cars, the sound from the XM module is sent to the radio head unit as an analog line level audio signal. In an ideal world, this doesn't present a problem at all, but in the real world, the wire can get a little too close to a line carrying power for something, maybe a transformer, a fluorescent light (your VFDs in the dash count :eek: ), an electric motor, or some other device that produces electromagnetic interference.

A while back, on a home audio system, I had a buzz on a rear channel, and only that channel. If I swapped the right and left rears at the amp wiring, the buzz stayed with the speaker, eliminating the amp as the problem. The problem turned out to be that a tie had come apart, and the wire for that speaker had fallen into contact with the power conditioner for the audio system. Power conditioners may produce very clean power, but they produce a lot of interference to any low voltage (signal or analog audio) wire within several inches of them.

Now, the digital deconding explanation is also plausible, as long as the cars that make this noise all have the same circuitry. Digital to Analog conversion circuitry isn't always perfect, some is actually pretty bad, and noise like this isn't uncommon. I'm not sure if the digital signal ends at the XM module, or if the radio gets the input as a digital signal in your system. If it is digital input, it could be that the digital to digital conversion in the XM unit is bad. (not all digital formats are the same - i.e. you can't just plug a DSS satellite dish into a digital TV with no decoder and expect it to work)