The station has begun test transmissions on DAB in London. Absolute CTRL will play a "selection of live recordings of rock and pop music aimed at a broad adult audience interested in live music".
Absolute, owned by the Times of India Group, already runs two digital-only stations, Absolute Radio Classic Rock and Absolute Radio Xtreme.
But while Classic Rock had 191,000 listeners in the first half of this year, Xtreme had an average weekly reach of just 58,000, down more than 50% on the first half of 2008.
Absolute Radio's main national music station has also suffered a big drop in listeners since its rebranding from Virgin Radio last year and now has a weekly audience of 1.69 million listeners, the majority of them via digital.
A spokeswoman for Absolute Radio said CTRL was an internal working title of the new station. It will be tested internally over the next few weeks before a pilot version is made available to a limited number of listeners.
The station's test recordings are currently sharing the same DAB slot as the children's radio station Fun Kids. The children's station airs between 6am and 7pm, with Absolute CTRL broadcasting between 7pm and 6am.
Absolute CTRL's broadcast licence was approved by the media regulator, Ofcom, earlier this month.
Absolute Radio's brand director, Chris Lawson, said it was the first of a number of new products the station wanted to unveil before its first anniversary in September.
"The digital team have been busy building a new radio platform and we are almost ready to share it with you," he wrote on the station's One Golden Square blog.
"Some of you may know it as Project Wallaby, Project Control, or 'Potentially the most exciting and innovative radio innovation ever'. OK, that's my name for it, not that I'm biased.
"We think it's one of a kind so it's going to be really exciting once we go through the traditional teething problems. It's only version one and we are looking at adding more features to it along the way."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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