Music
As I said, I like a fair old range of music. A small selection of some of the artists I like music by: Radiohead, Orbital, Chemical Brothers, R.E.M., Chicane, The Prodigy, Fleet Foxes, PJ Harvey, Chris Isaak, Stereophonics, Sasha, Red Snapper, Miles Davis, Counting Crows, Mozart, Beethoven, Thelonious Monk, Paul van Dyk
I don't tend to have favourites really; what I'll really enjoy listening to will depend on my mood. It's only more recently that I've been taking the time to explore classical music and jazz some more, partly prompted by getting a decent pair of headphones and a headphone amp, and wanting to try a range of music on them, and partly out of wanting to explore these genre, especially as many of the pieces are quite relaxing. I like listening to some relaxing music when I've gone to bed as it helps me get to to the state where I fall asleep quite quickly afterwards.
I quite like dance/techno mix albums; I find the style of music can be very energising and uplifting, or for the more chilled stuff very relaxing. The quality of mixing and track selection can be very variable though. Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure series are excellent, Paul van Dyk and DJ Tiesto do some decent mixes, and although some people would claim that Oakenfold has gone too commercial, his mix albums are usually at least reasonable, and are often great.
Headphones and Amps
After getting tired of having a rather naff cheap pair of Sony headphones (they were towards the lower end of Sony's range), I decided it was time for an upgrade and after doing some research and looking at my bank balance, I decided to plumb for some top of the range Sennheiser HD-600 headphones. I got them from Ask Direct who do them at the time of writing this for 120 UK pounds. That is fairly expensive for a pair of headphones, but they are very well built, should last years, and the quality is excellent.
Having got the headphones, I found that the portable CD player I have for relaxing and listening to music in the bedroom didn't really drive them terribly well. I had a look at seperate headphone amps, tried a cheap one, found it to be rubbish, so thought I'd try something a little nicer. The Musical Fidelity X-Cans V2 headphone amp seemed to have a lot of good reviews. It's not particularly cheap, but compared to many other quality headphone amps it gives excellent value for money and its bizarre cylindrical case gives it a relatively small footprint, which stops it cluttering up my bedside table. I've recently modified it to upgrade the internal capacitors using a kit from Rock Grotto - this was my first major bit of work with a soldering iron and it went surprisingly well.