A few weeks ago, there was a thread here about why there was a 15-minute dead air gap in the middle of the afternoon show on CKTB. 

On Wednesday came another treat for radio fans. It started when someone texted in that they heard a hum in the background of the signal on 610 and wanted to make sure the host knew about it. Most people would just turn that report over to engineering and move on.

Not Tom McConnell and his producer.

He not only read the text on air, he presumably switched to the on-air feed, paused so he could hear it and pronounced it a 60 Hz hum. He then asked his producer, who frequently contributes to his show, if he was using the "news mic." He replied no. 

After a commercial break and more listener messages about the noise, they did an entire segment trying to figure it out. That included cutting McConnell's mic and playing music to see if it was still there. But the hum remained.

He asked for those out of town to respond, as well, because some in Toronto said they couldn't hear it. 

Then it started becoming a thing, with one wise guy texting he'd like them to turn it up. McConnell's response - 'we're working on putting up a secondary audio channel so you can just hear the hum.'

But probably the best one came from a listener who said, "I'd rather hear the hum than a call from Sonny" (from Richmond Hill, an annoying regular caller who's been banned by almost all the Toronto talk stations.)

Eventually, the engineer on duty called in to say he was heading in to check on the problem and if it wasn't at the station, he would go to the transmitter. All through it, McConnell was explaining to listeners about how radio works and how he was on a direct feed and a delay, telling them "you (the listeners) are our monitors who tell us when we're off the air."

All in all, they turned a strange situation into something very fun and entertaining. And that's not something you would normally hear on a talk show having even minor technical difficulties. 

I'm no engineer, but I can guess the cause of the hum.

It probably didn't know the words...