When it comes to buying classical music recordings, unless you are completely impulsive and have time to cruise the Warehouse, we all need some expert advice about which of the now myriad recordings of the same work we should buy. Even though I now regard myself as something of an expert I still like others to help me draw up short lists.

What sort of advice do we require? Primarily, which artist/s are likely to give the most emotionally satisfying performance of the work? Next level, what is their comparative level of technical excellence, do they consistently play/sing in tune, do they play rhythms accurately, is their technique adequate to the demands of the piece? What style do they perform the work in, eg, Baroque music as performed and recorded in the 1930s, 1960s or in a recent 'period-style' manner? What is the recording quality like, bearing in mind that a cheap sound system will not reveal as much from the disc as a more expensive one? How does the perceived artistic/recording quality of the disc measure against its selling price - is it a bargain or a rip-off? These are some of the questions we want critics to answer.

As with any area of human activity where value judgements are crucial, the short answer is that we find and trust the critics that are, in general, aligned with our personal taste.

In the past we could rely on authoritative magazines like the Gramophone which had the best music critics, provided you could set aside their chauvinism about British performers. But that magazine has changed from being the consumers' watch-dog to becoming a lifestyle publication acting as the voice of and in the pockets of the recording industry. Over the years their reviews have become shorter, comparisons are very restricted, and were never very reliable in assessing sound quality. And many interesting recordings, even if available in the UK market, never get reviewed. The Gramophone's aim today is to sell more magazines and cds. Main advantage is the cover-mounted cd sampler. The rival British magazines are much the same. BBC Music is similar in style to Gramophone but has a cd featuring usually a single work recorded by the BBC that is not otherwise commercially available. International Record Review, while having more text, is fairly selective in what is reviewed and does not have a sampler cd.

I've not read the US Fanfare which I believe has more in-depth reviews that the British mags.

Increasingly, the alternative to the decline in classical cd reviews is to be found on the web. More often I find the customer-contributed reviews on the Amazon website useful. As an example I was quite happy with the Jorge Bolet Liszt discs until an Amazon customer thought them eclipsed by Claudio Arrau. He was right.

Two other websites I've recently found useful are www.classicstoday.com and www.musicweb-international.com

The latter's reviews can be quite long and detailed, which I prefer to the Gramophone's sound bites.

Also both Gramophone and BBC Music have websites whose data bases of cd reviews you can check for free - www.gramophone.co.uk and wwwbbcmusicmagazine.com