I've had satellite radio in my car for just about a year. And boy, do I love it. (In fact, I think I love it more than most people love their pets.) There's nothing like hopping in the car at lunch to check in with Al on The O'Franken Factor, or catching an NBA game on the way home from work.

On the flip side, there's also nothing like pulling into the driveway with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter and having to make that awful choice: Do I sit wedged in the car for another half hour to hear the end of the game, or do I head inside and flop down on the couch for some blissful after-work (but sans basketball) relaxation?

The solution is clear, of course: I need to get satellite radio in the house as well as in the car. The current crop of "plug-and-play" tuners (those little ones you can move from house to car to boombox) are definitely convenient, but I've been looking for something with a more "permanent" look for my home system. So when I heard about Kenwood's latest satellite radio invention, the DT-7000S, I was pretty excited. The DT-7000S is a component-style, full-sized SIRIUS satellite radio tuner with a big blue LCD display and some pretty futuristic styling. I decided to bring it home and put it through its paces, CrutchfieldAdvisor-style.



First impressions
When the DT-7000S arrived at my desk, I couldn't wait to check it out. I pulled it out of the box and plugged it in, just to get a feel for how it looked. Immediately, word spread around the department. Folks started stopping by my cubicle to "borrow a rubber band" (read: take a peek at the tuner), and the response was overwhelmingly positive. As for me, I totally dug the silver-and-blue cosmetic, although I was a little surprised at how lightweight the tuner felt.

The tuner offers a bank of numerical buttons to the left of the LCD, for entering stream (channel) numbers directly. To the right of the LCD, you get buttons for saving songs to memory, scrolling through preset banks, adjusting the display, and selecting "direct" or "preset" stream access. Two rotary knobs located on the top of the unit (check out the photo above) let you scroll through channels and categories. I loved the tactile "click click click" of the rotary knobs, and the LCD was bright enough to read easily, even right below a window with sunshine streaming in.

On the back panel of the tuner, I noticed that along with the standard RCA analog outputs and optical digital output, there's an RS-232 (serial) terminal. Very mysterious. I consulted the manual and found that the serial port wasn't for hooking the tuner up to a computer, as I had guessed, but instead allows it to interface with "compatible third-party control systems." Kenwood recommends that it only be used by professional system installers.