Clarion Calypso SIRIUS Satellite Radio tuner | 
 enlarge | Brand: Clarion
Category: CE
Buy New: $69.99
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 38395
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5
MPN: CALYPSO
Model: Calypso PnP
UPC: 029218013930
EAN: 0029218013930
ASIN: B0007YSDZS
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Calypso, combining style and sophistication, is the latest SIRIUS plug & play receiver from Clarion.PRODUCT FEATURES:Unique rotary knob for easy navigation;Integrated connectivity for antenna, audio, FM out, and power;Large 6-line display;30 channel presets;S-Seek;Wireless remote control;Integrated FM transmitter with 100 frequency selections.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 3 years later and the Calypso = solid, good player May 7, 2008
M. Garcia (Chicago, IL USA)
I've had this unit now for 3 years and have enjoyed using everyday. 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.
The screen is very bright, especially when it's dark or cloudy, and very intuitive right out of the box. 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 have the Sirius lifetime subscription for the unit and feel like it'll make it for many years to come. I've toyed with the idea of buying another/backup Calypso in the event mine goes out . . . but it doesn't seem like it will, so I'll just hold off.
Overall, a great purchase.
Good Radio March 5, 2007
Brendan (North Brunswick, NJ)
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. I had a problem with one when I first received it. 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. Since then, I have had no problems. I think it is worth the money if you want a good radio. I wound up buying the Sirius lifetime subscription because I am confident the radio will last a long time!
 Sounds great, but it already broke ... October 25, 2006
Payen (Los Angeles, CA)
I bought this unit, the car kit and the boombox last January. The sound is great, the installation in the car was easy. 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. That sucks.
Very Nice PnP Unit November 16, 2005
SevereWX (Suwannee County, FL USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Clarion continues it's legacy of high-quality products with the Clarion Calypso. This unit has a very solid feel, and good looks to match. 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.
After placing the antenna and aquiring a signal, the unit was ready to be activated. 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. 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. I can say it was better than FM, because there was no static, no fading in and out, just a solid clean signal. 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. 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. The display is bright, clear, and stylish. All of the buttons have a nice solid feel, and are backlit for ease of use in poorly lit environments. 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.
This is as good as it gets? June 25, 2005
Brett Buck (Sunnyvale, CA USA)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I recently bought this radio after returning a JVC Sirius receiver because of poor sound quality. The Calypso is much better in terms of sound quality - but, that's not really saying all that much.
The unit is nicely made and works fairly well. The main adjustment is with a knob that both rotates and is a push-button. I have found it somewhat too easy to accidently press the button (invoking the direct-tuning function by default) when trying to turn it. the know is just a little too small for my fingers, and has no knurled grips or anything like that.
It was very easy to set up the first time, except for the mounting -in the car, in this case. 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. Maybe 5 minutes total. You have to call Sirius to activate the unit, and it has to be on when you do it. The call wait was *very lengthy* - maybe 1/2 hour. But it was at least straightforward to pick a subscription package and get it working.
The FM modulator function worked pretty well. This unit can transmit on any of the FM frequencies, which is an improvement over a lot of the competing units. In my area, there are very few open channels, but I was able to find 5 pretty good ones. Some channels work better than others, for reasons I can't explain.
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. 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 think it's functioning correctly, but I am somewhat disappointed with the quality of the sound. If you are expecting CD-quality sound, you are in for a big surprise. The better channels on Sirius are more-or-less acceptable, with MP3-quality sound. Worse than a good FM station by far. This isn't very good to start with, but some of the channels have even more compression. The "talk" channels don't even get up to the quality of AM radio. It's more like a mediocre telephone call.
Overall, it's acceptable, but it's really nothing to write home about.
(addendum) I recently took a long car trip and used the Calypso receiver extensively. I noted some addtional thing about this. First, the sound is even worse than I initially thought. On the better channels, it's acceptable, but everything sounds a bit like it's begin transmitted from an echo chamber. These are typically music channels. Its nowhere near as good as a good FM station.
The talk channels are of telephone quality at best, and the compression artifacts gave me a headache after listening for an hour or so. 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 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.
I played around with audio CDs and various encoding speeds and methods to recreate the sound quality. For the good stations an 80 Kbps MP3 format is a good representation of the sound quality. 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.
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! The only fiddling I did was to change the FM transmitter frequency. 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.
I was however amazed that the unit took several minutes from a cold start to begin receiving a solid signal. I can't fathom how that could be the case with solid state electronics, aside from maybe the frequency reference being temperature-controlled. 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. Overnight, in the cool, and it took a few minutes to work. It turned out right away, but the reception was non-existent.
This may be related to another fact I noticed - the unit get remarkably hot in use. So hot to the point it was somewhat painful to touch, and I thought the plastic might melt. This even in a comfortably air conditioned car. I can't imagine how hot it would get outdoors. 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.
By far the nost suspect aspect of the car installation kit is the mounting of the antenna. 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. It just sort of flops around up there. It's not that easy to find a place to mount the receiver and the supplied mount is essentially useless.
The programming on each channel can be quite repetitive. It's no less programmed than the average FM station as near as I can tell. 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. But there are so many channels that you can usually find something worth listening to. 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. 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.
All in all, I thought that the radio and the service was probably worth having for such a long trip. But the audio quality is barely tolerable at best, the receiver is fairly fiddly operate, and it gets unnaturally hot. I have to admit to some disappointment, overall.
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