What has anyone done about the poor radio reception? what has the dealer told you? Thanks for your help.
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1990 240- 250K- Original Owner-M-47, VX cam, IPD sprt springs, bilstiens, spt exh, euro lamps-turbo whls,- still slow but handles well- Near Houston

I put in an after market Alpine XM satellite radio--terrific sound (I'm a home audiophile nut) and 0 reception problems (unless you are in a tunnel). Far, far better than the stock Volvo radio and you'd be surprise how good the existing speakers are.

The radio aerail on the XC90 is actually a printed film antenna below that black roof section. An amplifier will not work with that system.
Your owner's manual may be of some help as the Dolby feature makes the FM crackle if it is on if the signal strength fall below a level that is needed for it to work. The signal level needed for Dolby is far above what is needed for normal stereo FM to work with good sound quality.
This is something that can be turned off in one of the radio's menus.

It depends what type of reception problems you have. I have an 850 wagon, they don't have a traditional mast antenna; it's printed on one of rear windows and gets very weak FM reception. Anyway, I bought an FM signal booster from Crutchfield (about $20 I think) and wired that in and just zip tied it in place behind the stereo head unit. It gets a 12V power wire and then plugs inline between the existing antenna lead and the antenna plug in on the back of the head unit. It definitely improved the reception in my case, not sure how well it will work in the XC90.

That is good advice, I will check it out online.
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1990 240- 250K- Original Owner-M-47, VX cam, IPD sprt springs, bilstiens, spt exh, euro lamps-turbo whls,- still slow but handles well- Near Houston

An antenna amplifier is a really bad idea. Achieving better radio reception means improving the strength of the signal that you want to listen to relative to the noise that you want to avoid. An antenna amplifier can't discriminate between the signal and the noise, it boosts both exactly the same, so your signal-to-noise ratio is not improved, and you yield no improvement; in fact in the case of strong stations you'll end up introducing noise problems by overloading the front end of the radio.

The solution can only be provided by the design engineers, and purchasing folks at Volvo who specified the poor audio system, mostly to save money. Good radio reception involves a really well designed and executed radio front end, coupled with a critically executed glass antenna, and that's a much harder task than it sounds. It is infinitely more difficult to achieve mast antenna performance with a glass antenna. Getting close to mast antenna performance involves multiple tuners with multiple antenna grids in different locations on the car, coupled with critically designed and fine-tuned software to real-time sample the signal through different signal paths, and imperceptably switch from one antenna to the other to achieve the best performance and minimize the effects of radio disturbance noise. Accomplishing this more than doubles the cost of the tuner pack in the radio, results in a sophisticated and expensive antenna amplifier, and costly multiple antenna grids in remote locations on the car. You can find these types of solutions in almost every luxury car. Volvo on the other hand uses a single tuner front-end on the radio with a simple antenna amplifier and single-stage antenna grid.

Volvo's design engineers then remove almost all of the treble response from the audio system to attempt to mask the resulting disturbance noise that manifests itself most annoyingly with high frequencies. The result is lousy reception with awful fidelity, but it saves them gobs of money, and most folks are happy with the good mid-bass response that Volvo tunes the sound-systems to reproduce. A disaster for anyone who appreciates good sound fidelity, but the generally favorable response that Volvo has gotten for their modern audio systems, I think demonstrates that they have probably made a cost-effective choice for the average customer that doesn't know the difference.