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The author does not have a place for comments on his blog ... so I will use this space to suggest that: 1. anyone interested classical music should use Pandora

The author does not have a place for comments on his blog ... so I will use this space to suggest that: 1. anyone interested classical music should use Pandora.com to find out what they like: I ended up with a lot of Telemann and Corelli as performed by Manze and Egarr 2. if you have space in your apartment/house, go on Craigslist and get a decent set of speakers and a CD player and tuner/amp. Listening to classical on headphones is good but listening in open air is better.

stcredzero 17y ago
A pair of high-end Sennheisers can be a great investment. (I have the 580s, which were once the flagship, now outdated, but still very good.) I can also recommend the Etymotic ER4P in-ear headphones. Inexpensive but highly accurate small acoustic suspension speakers have been a commodity for awhile. Put these with a decent subwoofer with a built-in crossover, and you can get a very formidable setup, if you are willing to move your furniture around and hang things on your wall. Really good headphones can give you plug & play high fidelity, if you can live with a soundstage that's inside your skull. (I use a Velodyne powered subwoofer with a pair of NHT Subzero-XUs, with a home-made external high-pass filter between my NAD receiver and the Subzeros. The natural rolloff from the speakers, plus the high-pass filter and the low-pass filter on the subwoofer gives me a bi-amplified system on the cheap.)
rinich 17y ago
I never thought to use Pandora for classical music! Upvote for a marvelous suggestion.
- sp332 17y ago
  It took Pandora a long time to get classical music into their system because they weren't sure how to classify individual pieces. I mean, once you have a dozen versions of the same song by different orchestras with different conductors, the "What's your favorite song?" interface kind of breaks down.
  - jobrahms09 17y ago
    The crappy thing about classical music in Pandora is that if your piece spans multiple tracks (a good 80% of classical music falls into this category - multiple movements) you never get to hear the entire piece at once.

stcredzero 17y ago

A pair of high-end Sennheisers can be a great investment. (I have the 580s, which were once the flagship, now outdated, but still very good.) I can also recommend the Etymotic ER4P in-ear headphones. Inexpensive but highly accurate small acoustic suspension speakers have been a commodity for awhile. Put these with a decent subwoofer with a built-in crossover, and you can get a very formidable setup, if you are willing to move your furniture around and hang things on your wall. Really good headphones can give you plug & play high fidelity, if you can live with a soundstage that's inside your skull. (I use a Velodyne powered subwoofer with a pair of NHT Subzero-XUs, with a home-made external high-pass filter between my NAD receiver and the Subzeros. The natural rolloff from the speakers, plus the high-pass filter and the low-pass filter on the subwoofer gives me a bi-amplified system on the cheap.)

rinich 17y ago

I never thought to use Pandora for classical music! Upvote for a marvelous suggestion.

sp332 17y ago
It took Pandora a long time to get classical music into their system because they weren't sure how to classify individual pieces. I mean, once you have a dozen versions of the same song by different orchestras with different conductors, the "What's your favorite song?" interface kind of breaks down.
- jobrahms09 17y ago
  The crappy thing about classical music in Pandora is that if your piece spans multiple tracks (a good 80% of classical music falls into this category - multiple movements) you never get to hear the entire piece at once.