Many great responses here. I am interested in classical music and like yourself also like physical media. I am much younger than most posting here (29 years old), but also see the utility of not having emails, scrolling habits, screen glare distracting from the listening experience. Liner notes are also extremely useful for getting some background to the works.
As mentioned by others, “classical music” is a broad and almost useless term, though intuitively we all know what we are talking about. There’s so much under that umbrella term that if someone says they don’t like classical music then they simply haven’t been exposed because there’s literally something for everyone.
I agree that ‘redbook’ CD or SACD is the way to go for physical media. Although there is a tremendous amount of music released on hybrid SACD (can be played on standard CD player, reading only redbook layer), most classical physical releases are simply redbook CDs. Personally, I just buy what I want to hear and don’t worry about SACD vs RBCD difference. I will say, it gets frustrating for someone like myself who doesn’t have an SACD transport, but wants to play physical media and still get HiRes quality. The industry simply isn’t there for us non megarich consumers.
When thinking about classical music everyone thinks of the baroque period, classical period, and romantic period. There’s a joyous treasury of music outside of this, including renaissance and medieval music, modern music, “world music”, electronic art music, other meaningless labels that extend beyond the reach of what most people think of classical music, but demand the same attentive listening stance as classical music.
The website Prestomusic has a “record of the week” column that may be useful for you in terms of discovery. If you find something you like read about similar artists and branch out from there! For me, that is one of the joys of physical media – reading the contributing artists and picking up their work.
I know you didn’t ask for specifics but I have been
enjoying:
21st century music:
A Far Cry – The Law of Mosaics – brilliant recording of Andrew Norman’s “The Companion
Guide to Rome”
Hughes Dufourt – L’Afrique d’apres Tiepolo, L’Asie d’apres Tiepolo
Toshio Hosokawa – Gardens
Classical:
Mozart – Violin Sonatas – Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melkinov
Baroque:
Sean Shibe – Bach Lute Suites on Classical Guitar
Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque – Bach’s Art of Fugue
Early Music:
La Morte Della Ragione – Il Giardino Armonico