As a former Chicagoan, I am NOT supposed to have anything nice to say about Milwaukee. A year or so ago, I heard a radio rip of the Milwaukee Symphony performing a quite spectacular M2. Milwaukee has an orchestra? And they can play...Mahler? Absolutely, I found.
Yesterday, I was excited to see a post on the M-List about the Milwaukee Symphony doing commercial releases of their performances as MP3 downloads. The price is cheap, around $5 for a full symphony. The files are encoded as 320Kbps Mp3's, so the quality is much better than the downloads available at iTunes. In fact, the engineered sound is really quite good on my Nomad Zen player, and even when I turn the files into CD's. I purchased an M7 and a Saint-Saens Organ Symphony. The SS is supposedly a binaural recording, and it does indeed sound great on headphones. The M7 is also quite a nice performance. There are several brass boo-boos throughout, but nothing too bad. The orchestra plays very well, and has a wonderful transparency to their sound. The only annoying thing is that the conducter, Andreas Delfs, stomps his foot loudly throughout the performance. However, he chooses very nice tempos, for the most part.
I recommend you all take a look.
http://download.mso.org/app