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I use:

http://www.classicsonline.com/
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/
http://www.linnrecords.com/
http://store.harmoniamundi.com/ (no download)
iTunes
Spotify

http://hyperion-records.co.uk/ http://www.theclassicalshop.net/ http://linnrecords.com/ http://www.dacapo-records.dk/ and http://www.analekta.com/ http://www.classicsonline.com/ absolutely deserves mention, but has little on flac http://www.passionato.com/ and http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/ are good, but don't provide booklets

That should be modded doubleplusinformative. I didn't know they did direct sales. If I'd given it a moment of thought it ought to have been obvious of course.

Not the best organised site, mind. If you search for Ligeti in FLAC format, nothing comes up; but if you search for MP3 format, both FLAC and MP3 formats come up.

http://www2.deutschegrammophon.com/home
high-quality MP3s + PDFs
I would bet on FLAC within a year

DG get it. Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft supplies 380k mp3s with pdf format booklets and album art. All for less than the physical cd. I've bought several things from them already and intend to buy more.

Deutsche Grammophon have just opened their huge catalogue of Clasical Music and are now selling them as 320 kbps MP3s here.

With Universal's products, you can selectively scare the kids of your lawn, or attract them. For this, they use an ingenious system based on the age/frequency-dependent brain impulse generation in humans.

all on cdrs and played in a Recording Studio on:

• B&W Nautilus 803, Marantz CD14 with amp PM14 (Straightwire Pro cabling and extra's) [DM30000- so bit more than $15000]
• Sennheiser Orpheus Electrostatic Reference-headphones with tweaked accompanying amp (digital and analog out) [>$10000]

Now how realistic does that sound? The article I referred to in my first post obviously shows that there actually are people who have this kind of expensive devices in their houses, but how many percent of the total population is that? So how does this laboratory test translate to a home situation in which someone has Winamp play some tunes while typing in Word?

This is exactly what I meant. People don't listen to MP3 because of their quality, but because the ease of use. Sure, you can buy expensive software to make almost-perfect MP3's, but what's the use? Who'd want an MP3 that's twice as big as a normal one? The people who really want this quality (whether they can actually discern between a good and a bad one or not) will not bother to do so: they'll simply feed their CD-player with a good CD. I'm not talking about Naxos and the likes, more about Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, but you seem to know about differences in quality.

And please don't make it look like I said things like but I can always tell the difference! and Ogg is better because... because I didn't say that. I tried quite some different encoders in the past and I indeed could hear the difference between a few of them (Xing was terrible), but none of them could encode at 256kb/s and of course I didn't have the expensive stuff that C'T used. I didn't say that Ogg was better either, just that this is one piece of software that you can use the way you like, no strings attached. Ever tried the Fraunhofer encoder? I did, but it took me quite some time to have it cracked (yeah, sure, as if you're really going to pay for it...). Ogg is better in that it's free from whatever registration or content protection whatsoever. And that's a thing I treasure, as do a lot of folks here on /.

As other people have pointed out, Ani DiFranco's label is independent. Also, if you're into Celtic music, Loreena McKennit's label, Quinlan Road is independent as well...

To people who recommend looking for overseas labels, I must note that a lot of foreign music is distributed through RIAA-affiliated labels. For example, Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical music label, distributes in the US through Universal Classics.

All that said, I think that boycotting the RIAA because it's trying to shut down a pure piracy operation like Napster is ludicrous... The RIAA deserves a boycott for pushing Britney Spears, 'NSync, and the Backstreet Boys to the top...