How to find the good CD recordings?

lowrider, interesting that you mention the loudness wars. I don't think loudness and volume are the same thing but certain CDs are definitely louder at a given volume than others. A new CD I purchased recently by a new glam band, The Struts, is noticeably louder than most of my other CDs. The quality seems fine, but they're not really a sit and listen type band. (Going to see them in October. They're nothing earth shaking but they are a breath of fresh air in an otherwise pretty stagnant rock landscape.

lowrider, my system is an AR LS16 tubed pre-amp and a Madrigal Proceed HPA2 (Levinson) amp with Aerial Acoustics 7b speakers. Totally inherited, I had nothing to do with their selection. Not sure how it stacks up but is leaps and bounds better than anything I've ever had.

I look forward to looking into the sources you guys have provided.

whart wrote:

None of the Zep albums are in my view of audiophile quality-- it is somewhat sad, given the significance of the band, that they weren’t able to put together better quality recordings.

I came late to LZ (1978-ish) and even though never an audiophile I kind of got that impression even back then. They seemed to have other priorities than production value whereas with Rush, Floyd and others, production seemed to be very important to the band.

You may also want to peruse The Absolute Sound's Super Disc list.  It is a quite extensive listing of superior recordings of both the symphonic, jazz and popular categories.

I’m not a big fan of Geddie Lee’s voice, but I know there are lots of discussions over the merits of various pressings and I have a couple of the records here somewhere. And Floyd- well, Wish You Were Here and Dark Side are obvious favorites, the latter having been done with Alan Parsons. Back to your original question about production values, I’d say yes-- those bands probably have better sounding recordings than Zep did. I think the Stones (and I’m not a great fan of theirs either, though I liked the Mick Taylor era best) had some really awful sounding recordings when they were at their peak. Sticky Fingers, Exile, etc. I have an early stereo UK pressing of Let it Bleed that sounds great, though.
Thing is, a lot of the standard Redbook is pretty much bargain basement pricing and going down, while SACDs and some of the fancier CD issues command money. I think you could spend wisely and buy a whole lotta CDs for your money these days. I bought a bag full at one of the local stores- not necessarily knowing what all of them would sound like, sonically. They were cheap enough-- 3-5 bucks a pop that it was worth just grabbing them. For those that suck, I can simply sell them back to the store for a buck or whatever --
FWIW, the "loudness wars" is all about having everything at '11'-- it's a certain style of recording/production/mastering- so there is no dynamic range, i.e., contrast between loud and soft. As a result, what you hear is very flat in a dimensional sense, with little life-- kinda dead sounding, b/c everything is brought up (or down) to the same levels through the use of compression. 

whart, I also like the older Zep and lean strongly toward their blues based songs. So strongly in fact that I've gotten into the blues that inspired them and have collected many of the blues songs they, well, ripped off. Unfortunately all of these blues songs I collected via iTunes which I only recently learned and now recognize are of fairly poor quality.

I really, really don't want to go down the rabbit hole of collecting blues 45s (or earlier) so I'm not even sure how to go about getting quality recordings of that music......which was as often as not produced on old equipment and with fairly poor quality.

I have enjoyed going to Clarksdale, Mississippi (where the fabled crossroads are) for their spring blues festival. There are stencils of Robert Plant's face spray painted all over Clarksdale.