It's a Beautiful Day - It's the only one I have at this time Joseph, lol. I will probably get a turntable next year (much to my wife's dismay)and start a new obsession.
There are really too many to list. Paul Desmond, Count Basie, Patsy Cline, Elvis, Jim Reeves, Beatles, Dire Straits, Chopin, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Copeland, Bernard Hermann and Tibetan bells all get frequent play time.
Does that Tibetan bells have some soothing deep tones?? Also Jan (thanks for not just leaving that smart comment) do you notice a difference in the heavy pressings over the standard ones, i.e. the new re-releases in 180 and 200 gram vinyl??
j.c. - You have to remember I have been buying records for over 40 years; the comment was not so much smart as it is, in my experience, hopeful.
180/200 gram vinyl is another reintroduction of how things used to be. The difference now is the record labels turning out these products have a very small "artisan" cottage industry which appeals to a small niche of the buying public. For the most part, the customers for the current LP market expect to get something special when asked to part with $30 or more for a record.
The popularity of CD when it entered the market was the customer's response to the sad state that vinyl had reached by the 1980's. Manufacturers were reusing vinyl returned as defective and grinding eveything into a slurry (sometimes including bits of old labels) to make new records. That is how the term "virg*n" vinyl came into the audiophile lexicon. Small manufacturers returned to how things should be, and once were, done.
I have more than my share of older LP's that I've acquired, mostly used, that do not flex when picked up. The use of 180 gram "vir*in" vinyl is merely what all record manufacturers did until the mid 1960's.
As record manufacturers looked for ways to make more profit, the quality of the product was the first to suffer. The market denegerated into poor production techniques, almost nonexistent quality control and over production of product no one wanted. The low point of the LP's decline began when RCA introduced "Dynagroove" recordings in the 1970's. This was an attempt to minimize the outlay on the actual product by reusing and pressing records so thin there was bleed-through from side to side.
Many of the records I've found from the 1950's through the mid '60's are of excellent quality with terrific sound. In some cases, sound so good you want to know what happened that made records so bad for so long. (For the most part I know and it is always driven by profits over quality.) The problem with old records is you have to like old artists (mostly dead artists at this point). If you listen to classical music or old jazz, this isn't a problem as you can find the music you want by an artist that had tremendous talent and in many cases substantial control over the production quality.
There are quite a few mono recordings in my collection that I bought for the music more than the sound. (I understand others are now finding the wealth of material available in used mono.) In many cases the mono production is of very high quality (pressed on 180/200 gram vir*in vinyl) and the surfaces are extremely quiet. I visited the local library a while back and bought 60 LP's for $12. The mix of what I acquired was stereo and mono and many appeared to have virtually no play time when I opened them. Since many of these mono LP's were recorded with techniques looking forward to stereo production, the spatial qualities of good mono are suprising. And besides, how much soundstaging does a solo violin or piano require?
So when you come from the era when the new Elvis or Beatles LP would set you back $3.49, the present day cost of $30 and up per LP is staggering. But then I can't get used to the fact the average price of a car is $25k.
I have plenty of 1/2 speed masters (mostly Mobile Fidelity) and direct to disc (Sheffield, Yamaha, JVC, etc.) recordings from the waning days of the LP that sound great. Still one of my favorites is a Dave Grusin direct to disc done by Sheffield. It has some of the best sound of anything in my collection. (I bought several reissue [direct to tape] copies of this disc to use as demos and the sound was no where near the same quality. Direct to disc was a noble experiment. Once again making records the way they were made before tape and mixing consoles got involved. The total number of LP's pressed depended on the number of discs that could be made from the original master stamping discs.) Unfortunately the music is not anything I want to listen to on many of these "specialty" discs. The reissue market today is selling the same recordings as my old Mobile Fidelity's but at higher prices. At least this gives the buyer the ability to find music they want to listen to and quality that is, for the most part, exemplary.
To finally answer your question, yes, I find the quality of the heavy pressings to be overall quite good. Though I have too many standard issue LP's that sound just as good. At one point almost every record sounded good, even the budget labels, but things changed. (I can't get over how good the sound is on a Rounder budget label issue of Copland's Rodeo. This sound from an album I paid $1 to buy 30 years ago is unbelievable.)
The following list are favorite albums that happen to combine great music with great, or at least very good, sound quality:
Classical:
Mahler Symphony 2, Solti (60's London) Stravinsky conducts The Rite of Spring, Petruchka, the Firebird (Columbia) Beethoven, Symphony 5, C. Kleiber (DG) Beethoven, Symphony 9, Karajan (60's DG) Bach, Art of Fugue, Munchinger (London)
Jazz:
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Classics reissue) John Coltrane, Blue Train Sonny Rollins, Way Out West Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (Verve, mono) Bill Evans, Sunday at the Village Vanguard/Waltz for Debbie
Rock/Pop:
Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks Fleetwood Mac, Rumours Dire Straits, Making Movies/Love Over Gold Johnny Cash, American Recordings IV Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis
There are lots more. I've just listed what I've been listening to a lot lately.