Chris Evans on Virgin Radio breakfast (2019)

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Philip
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Apparently they’ve done a deal to transfer most of the show features and jingles from his Radio 2 breakfast show to the new show on Virgin Radio.

If that’s the case, what exactly was the point of moving to Virgin in the first place? I thought it was supposed to be a new challenge, and therefore a radically different show, away from having to please everyone all the time when you do Radio 2 breakfast. There aren’t even going to be ad breaks, due to the sponsorship with Sky, to give it even just a slightly different feel.

Are they really expecting all of his former listeners on breakfast to move over? Because I imagine they listened to him because they listen to Radio 2, not because they listened specifically to Chris Evans.

Anyway, it starts this Monday, 21st January.
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Jamesypoo
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Philip wrote: Fri 18 Jan, 2019 13.00 Apparently they’ve done a deal to transfer most of the show features and jingles from his Radio 2 breakfast show to the new show on Virgin Radio.

If that’s the case, what exactly was the point of moving to Virgin in the first place?
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Martin Phillp
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When Chris Evans went to Virgin in the 90s, it was an almost identical format to his Radio 1 show. Some things don't change if he's doing a carbon copy of his Radio 2 programme on a niche digital station.
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Philip
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Okay, I’ll admit it actually sounded pretty good this morning from what I heard. I was half expecting the production quality to sound like what I usually expect from Virgin Radio - i.e. not very good, but it sounded very good today.

It’s being carried on the new spin-off stations Virgin Anthems and Virgin Chilled, which are in DAB+ stereo, meaning you have the odd situation where if you listen to it on the main station it’s in mono but on the spin-offs it’s in stereo.
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Martin Phillp
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Apart from the copious mentions of Virgin and Sky, you could be mistaken for listening to Radio 2 this morning. The news bulletins even sounded PSB.
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Philip
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Martin Phillp wrote: Mon 21 Jan, 2019 17.55 Apart from the copious mentions of Virgin and Sky, you could be mistaken for listening to Radio 2 this morning. The news bulletins even sounded PSB.
I can understand why he decided to take the same show over, sort of. Get as many people who listened to the Radio 2 show to tune in. But I do hope he starts to change things. His Radio 2 show wasn’t for me at all, but I know he’s one of our great broadcasters and so I was hoping he’d do something different.
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bilky asko
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I'd not realised that Rachel Horne was both the newsreader and travel reporter - meaning the 7am jingle needed a naff rework.
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Philip
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On the Virgin Radio app it shows you what song is currently playing with artwork. But it seems to be on a massive delay, to the point where it goes off ages before the song actually starts.

The stream doesn’t seem to be on too much of a delay compared to the DAB feed - I wonder if Chris is triggering something in the playout system which makes the app think a song is playing but he’s just queued it up.
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Jamesypoo
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How is the Chris Evans Virgin show faring with audience figures?

Similarly the Radio 2 changes? I've not heard any massive backlash or anything like we did for Mayo & Whiley so assume things can't be too bad?
Philip
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Why does Virgin Radio on DAB sound so bad compared to something like Radio X which actually sounds really good, despite them both being 80kbps mono? Are Global just better at processing things to sound good at that bitrate?
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Nick Harvey
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I'm not going to even try to explain the complexities of the different compression on the various Virgin feeds, but I would recommend looking it up on Google and also compare the various feeds on DAB, Sky, Freeview, etc. You'll notice huge differences.
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