CHUM AM in Toronto, apparently concluding that an oldies format doesn’t work, has decided to kill almost all of what little programming remains and just replace it with audio from CP24, starting Thursday as CP24 launches a new morning show (among the show’s hosts is Steve Anthony, a former morning man at CHOM and who has since worked at The Mix 99.9 in Toronto).
While I understand there’s some value to listening to audio from television on radio (just this evening I listened to part of CBC News at Six on 87.7 FM while I was on the train), this strikes me as a let’s-not-even-bother-trying move, turning a radio station into nothing more than an audio rebroadcaster.
Can nothing more interesting be done with an AM transmitter than that?
UPDATE (April 15): The Toronto Star looks at CHUM AM’s history.
Whatever happened to finding a few 20-somethings that had a huge passion to music and just letting them pick whatever they want so that people could listen to awesome new music they’d never heard.
Oh right, that never happened. Guess that’s why people only listen to the radio when they’re stuck in traffic and don’t have a choice.
Techie note for those who care: 87.7 FM is the actual audio frequency for channel 6 (CBC). It isn’t a separate station unto itself as this “new” CHUM will be.
This is very similar to the audio carrier for Global Television in this area. I’m not far from the Paris, Ontario transmitter, and you can tune in to the audio of the channel (last I checked) at the very bottom end of the FM band – possibly the same frequency (87.7) as Marc describes for the CBC there.
Television’s channel 6 is located just below the FM broadcast band (which starts at 88 MHz), and the audio signal for television uses the same system (wide-band FM, though at a lower audio level). Most FM radios take advantage of this and allow you to tune down to 87.5MHz so you can pick up the audio feed of channel 6.
Unfortunately, it’s only for channel 6 that this works, and it will stop working when CBMT switches to digital transmission in 2011.
No matter, by that time, if they switch to HD, your PDA (crackberry) will have a tuner for HDTV. Already being planned.
I don’t recall this change ever being made public..I will NEVER NEVER go onthis site again…so sad CHUM..GOODBYE…
Just a footnote..to the jerks who made the decision..are you the same idiots who decided CHUM should be a sports
station ? ha ha that was a good one….
What are you thinking??? CHUM was the only station worth listening to at work – easy listening sucks and news ALL DAY – I fight with my partner about watching it for 1/2 hr. at night.
Seeing as Corus is gutting its staff from CINF – Info 690, I could conceivably see them entering into an LMA with Québecor and turning CINF into a full-time audio regurgitator of LCN. Whether or not such a thing would be good…I don’t know. One thing for sure, it’s a dirt-cheap way to run an all-news radio station.