Why do I keep torturing myself with remasters?

"you can listen to the James Gang on 8 track player and it's all good."  Let's not get crazy now!  :-)

Glad you are a fan, whart.  What surprises me is how good the sonics are on that first album.  On the other hand, listened to JW's Barnstorm (not a remaster but uncertain what "CD issue" it was) and the sonics were kind of painful.  Good dynamics, not compressed but "loud" vocals had an edge to them and that's from CD ripped to hard drive.  

Analogue Productions & Speakers Corner are quality reissues.  other wise, stick to originals or at the very least, reissues by the same company that pressed the original (though that is a bit risky).  Sometimes you have no choice on hard to find original from the 50s or 60s, let alone trying to find some in Near Mint condition.

Thats was the point, remasters was to make them brighter; louder and powerful to the extend of over exaggeration..
Try Japanese remasters or stick to the priginal !

Oleschool,
I too have had terrible luck with remasters, SHM-SACDs, and almost everything MoFi.  They are all soft, EQ'd, compressed, based up, etc. very disappointed in the difficulty of finding "the right" as in best, version of an album.  Argh!  At least it's Friday.  :-)

Check some Fremer articles on Analog Planet that address this issue. He calls out labels that only do all-analog remaster/represses and some of the charlatans. 
http://www.analogplanet.com/content/reissue-labels-avoid-and-some-best-proceed-caution#gHK6bJ684z2Bo...

The best ones I'm getting these days are the 200g ones from Analogue Productions. All my Speakers Corner LPs are great too, including solo cello, large scale orchestra, Count Basie, Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane, and my ORGs are great too. 

Maybe I'm lucky or the higher number of reissues of pop and rock results in a larger number of bad ones.