Why do I keep torturing myself with remasters?

I find these $40 re-releases are often inferior to the original, which in many cases is $10.  40 year old master tapes can sound good, but often don't and I doubt Columbia, Warner, etc are sending the primo tapes to these companies making a run of 5,000 records for audiophiles. 

One of the things that everyone seems to forget is that each company that does re-mastering is setting up the cutting lathe (slightly) differently and you will have to adjust your VTAs to eliminate the brightness and bass emphasis. One you do this you will notice the improvement that most re-mastering makes. For example, the difference between the VTA adjustment for an acoustic sounds re-master and mobile fidelity re-master is about 0.013. The good thing is the two companies seem to setup their lathes consistently and you can adjust the VTA the same for each family of pressings.

I am quite frustrated too, especially at the price point we are now paying for these albums. I find it "hit and miss" with the quality of most of these now.

Mostly miss 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Remastering has come to be synonymous with overly aggressive dynamic range compression. It’s gotten SO bad, in fact, that remasters that used to be say orange, red, green (Average, Lowest, Highest) are now red, red, red. Forget about it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. Add to that the fact that most CDs are in reverse absolute polarity and what you wind up with is a steaming pile of compost.