Remasters-who does the best.

Mobile Fidelity is the first one that comes to mind for me.

I have tens of thousands of CDs

Wow. With such a great collection I'm surprised you have an interest in remastered CDs. You probably have all the originals and, except for all DCC, many MFSL, most Audio Fidelity, I give the nod to the originals, particularly the WG and JPN discs.

Most are one step forward, two steps back.

Regards,

Putting older CDs on a music server with effective automatic loudness adjustment, like SqueezeServer, helps equalize the overall loudness across tracks and disks may go a long way towards making older duller sounding disks sound better in comparison to newer remasters.

In general, I find most newer remasters to be quite good. The lemons usually occur in the realm of remastered hits packages of older pop/rock/top 40 material where loudness adjustments are poorly or misapplied in the interest of pure volume.

The best example of this in my colelction is a CD collection of Huey Lewis and the News hits.

The loudness adjustment functionality on the Squeeze server does help alleviate this to some extent.

I can't see your system, so I am blindly going to suggest you keep your existing CD's and upgrade to a quality DAC. In fact, if you still use a disc spinner, consider ripping your music to a server, then feeding a top notch DAC, and you may get what you are looking for by taking the mechanics out, and using the latest, and best, technology for listening to your 44.1 ones and zeros.