CD sound quality: original pressings vs regular remaster vs MFSL, etc

What matters most is the dac these days, not the transport. A very good dac today can make a lot of the old cds sound much better. Some remasters sound better than the original and some the other way around. Get the best dac you can afford and it will make any digital source sound the best it can be.

If you can find the titles you desire in  HDCD are excellent if your player can decode them.

Great topic for a thread. I have a Marantz SA-KI Ruby and have regular vintage CD's, HDCD, Japanese BluSpc CD's, Remastered CD's, MOFI Gold CD's, SHM-CD, UHQCD's, K2HD's, MasterSound CD's, Canadian SACD, MOFI Hybrid SACD, multichannel SACD, SHM-SACD............

Each sounding different, some great and some surprisingly lousy for their cost. Every person has their opinion on which format they like or think is the best. I'm a collector so I have to try what's out there. Of course there always is the argument people have on specs, file transfer, reading, cd construction material, etc.

I have read discussions in other forms about cd formats and various artists and some agreements are surprising. On one forum the consensus of Bostons 1st album is the original US disc is the best sounding of all formats. The SACD is bright, Mastersound sucks etc etc.

As people have stated here, it's a good time to buy cd's since record prices have gone insane.....

Thanks for all the advice.  Re-entering high end audio after like 30 years.

I just bought an oppo/modwright 105 CD player.

I was going to do the streaming/save all my CDs to HD, but after some brief research it seemed like doing it well was more complicated than I wanted to deal with learning now, though I'll probably hook up streaming to my system eventually.  I've tried the amazon streaming on my iphone and it is convenient (though terrible for searching classical).  I'll check out Quobuz and Idagio when the time comes.