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

+1 @georgehifi . I do the same thing. 
And like @falconquest  i Google Steve Hoffman to find a recommendation.

georgehifi has brought up one of the factors to consider. George is a dynamic range true believer. He always likes the release with the greatest dynamic range. There is nothing wrong with that.

Dynamic range is the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds on a song or track. In the 90s and continuing to this day, record companies began compressing music. You may have heard of the Loudness Wars. This is what they are talking about. Albums with too low a dynamic range sound loud and harsh. They will give you a headache or make you want to turn the volume down.

Greater dynamic range is always desirable but, IMHO, sometimes an album with lower dynamic range (but not too low a dynamic range) can sound better due to greater clarity, better mix, etc. It’s one factor to be aware of and you should try to find out by comparing different releases of the same album with different dynamic ranges what level of dynamic range you are comfortable with.

I also wanted to add that you don’t always need to find the best release of an album. People disagree about which is the best and the best may be expensive and hard to find. The second or third best might be good enough and the difference between them and the best may not be as great as the impression you get by reading the SH forums. There are people there that are sound quality extremists. Most people would never notice some of the sound problems they find intolerable.

Again, Good Luck!

Greater dynamic range is always desirable

No it isn’t.
Make this experiment:
Take your most dynamic cd and play it in you car when you drive somewhere.

You will greatly be disappointed that in that noisy environment you will not be able to hear the faintest details you do at home. But you know that they are there and you completely missing them and the performance is more or less gone out of the window.

I did that once and were looking forward to get a treat during my car ride. And wow what I got disappointed.. And I the vise versa is also true take out from your car, for example the lady gaga album Joanne on CD an play it at home in your main system. It is unbearable to listen to in a environment of 30 dB.

In your car the noise level is 60-70 dB..

Yes, it is always desirable to have the right amount of compression depending on noise level of the environment.

That is why we can find a setting called volume level in Spotify that has 3 different states: "quiet", "normal" and "loud" (something like that mine is not in US language).

When we understand what that setting means and do.. it is actually translate to: "no compression", "some compression" and "more compression".
Depending on how noisy your environment are.

optimize, I almost included the road noise point in my post, but felt I had gone on long enough. You’re right, the car is a good place for lower dynamic range recordings. I don’t think the OP wants to upgrade his album collection for use in his car though.

While I'm at it, let me recommend getting a streamer and DAC and a subscription to Qobuz or Tidal, as an alternative to replacing your album collection.  Both have a free one month trial period.  Qobuz has a large number of hi-res recordings and Tidal has a fair number of MQA recordings.  You can listen to a lot of hi-res music for $15 to $20 a month and when you decide which albums you really want a physical copy of you can seek out the best version of those.  It might save you some time and trouble.

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.