My guess from Stads:
Hold Your Fire is #1
Moving Pictures is #19
Haha. My problem is, there's a list somewhere here where I did this already. The trick is to be fairly faithful to that. I know generally where every album is going to be, it's just the fine tweaks - "Signals", or "A Farewell To Kings"?
Yeah...I think a lot of us have posted Rush album lists over the years. I have no idea if what I submitted matches any such list I may have posted. And parsing between some albums is even more difficult when they sound almost nothing alike. It's pretty easy to choose between FBN and COS, but choosing between FBN and VT is MUCH more difficult.
Ultimately, if I had trouble deciding between two albums, I just asked myself, "Which album do I listen to more these days?"
Bill used the "Signals or A Farewell to Kings?" example, and for me, while my immediate thought would be, "Oh, A Farewell to Kings is better," in the last few years, I have listened to Signals far more often than AFTK, so that was the tiebreaker for me in instances like that.