Metropol

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.

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?

£££

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd not realised that Rachel Horne was both the newsreader and travel reporter - meaning the 7am jingle needed a naff rework.

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.

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?

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?

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.