I found this on Amazon in a series of comments on a review of the Szell
Haydn box on Sony/RCA.

 Andre Gauthier<
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2IHM22X3QPXIJ/ref=cm_cr_rev_detpdp
>says:
I assume you refer to the mid priced RCA set when talking about the Brahms
Symphonies with Levine. They were just reissued in a box set by Sony/BMG,
right? I certainly hope THEY redid them. I had the misfortune of making the
first CD transfers for those. (I was a producer of reissue and live
recordings at RCA/BMG for 8 years.) We had to use dreadfully mixed,
cluttered sounding, LP masters because the 24 track (!) tapes were so badly
engineered thanks to the interference of producer Tom Shepard. Levine was a
very good conductor in those days, although I found that his worship of
Toscanini caused far too much imitation of some of the Italian's less
flattering gimmicks. Fortunately he didn't use Toscanini's orchestral
amendments that you hear in literally everyone of his Brahms Symphony
recordings, regardless of the orchestra or year. I've not heard the Levine
set in 20 years because of that bad experience. I'll have to borrow the new
one to see if its better. When we worked on it the original session
engineer, Paul Goodman, helped us try to do the 24 track version. His
comment: "Those were my darkest days. We had to put 8 mics just on the
first violins. Mr. Shepard wanted to control everything on a 48 track
board. Oye! Levine's RCA opera recordings with Richard Mohr producing and
my own engineer, Anthony Salvatore doing the recording work, used 8 mics on
the entire orchestra in Kingsway Hall in London. Those 8 mics were mixed to
a 4 track recorder. Even when Shepard told them to use 24 tracks, they
muted 16 of them on the back of the recorder and Shepard never could tell
the difference. More mics is always bad for orchestral music.