What's the difference, in y'all's minds, between the two orchestra designations? I believe we talked about this eons ago, but since we've gotten a lot of new "fonts" here since then, I wanted to bring it up again.

I tend to think "bigger" when I hear "philharmonic"--though I can't say why! None of the dictionaries on Onelook gave any etymology on the word symphony; Gurunet has this, for philharmonic: [French philharmonique, from Italian filarmonico : Greek phil-, philo-, philo- + Greek harmonika, theory of music, from neuter pl. of harmonikos, musical; see harmonic.]
I'm beginning to be real impressed (there's another instance of the vanishing adverb, WW) with Wikipedia. They give a neat history of orchestral development:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony+orchestra

And Wikipedia has it thusly:

Full size orchestras may sometimes be called "symphony orchestras" or "philharmonic orchestras"; these prefixes do not indicate any difference either to the instrumental content or role of the orchestra, but can be useful to distinguish different orchestras based in the same city (for instance, the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra).

Love it when my prejudices are confirmed ...

I always thought a Philharmonic had some sort of philanthropic group behind it, a musical society; and a symphony was, err, I don't know.

and a symphony was

one o' them keyboards that make fake sounds? ;)

one o' them keyboards that make fake sounds?

one o' them keyboards that make* fake sounds?

Thank you.


~~~
* (e.a.)

Wait a minute! What's a fake sound? One that isn't made up of waves of alternating compression and decompression of some medium in the range of about 40 to 20,000 cycles per second?

Oh, don't worry about it. It's bound to be a Welsh thang, and there'll be a sheep involved somewhere ...