Low
Gens
Live music collecting has always been something that requires a lot
of time and/or resources. Obtaining live performances isn't as easy
as going down to your local discount center. Obtaining shows has always
involved networking with other people. This is often a positive experience
but problems exist.
In the days of vinyl bootlegs (when only small part of Led Zeppelin's
live catalogue was covered) the only way to purchasing a concert was
to get a copy of the show from the master tape. That caused many generations
of the same recording but due to amateur, poor techniques of copying
the quality of most copies was far away worse than original one and
the copies were also very often occured by tape noise, cuts and distortions.
Only very small amount of the original master tapes are survived.
Most of them have been lost or destroyed accidentally and high gen
copys are the only remainders of those glory days.
No doubt in the tape trading days every copy meant some sound quality
loss. The digital cloned copies of modern times is far removed from
the hissy cassette days. The tape trading days involved a smaller
group of die hard collectors. Need to say that the people were of
a higher standard in the collecting circles, but that is a different
subject.
The CD-R trading days has been (and still are) one of great highs
and great lows. CD-R burner's have meant that it's possible to obtain
a CD-R that can sound as good ten copies later as the original sounded.
Unfortunately too many people have no idea how to copy discs correctly
and that often introduced copies with a lot of digital errors such
as gaps, dropouts, static, pops, etc. This has caused a lot of people
to long for the old days of hissy tape trading.
In addition to the trading of CD-Rs there have been other means of
distribution such as trees, weeds, and vines. All of these have relied
upon people having the technical ability to copy CD-Rs again, which
the vast majority can not do. Trees require people to distribute shows
in a timely manner, which doesn't always occur.
The future is potentially interesting with the advent of things such
as several Internet torrents etc. I'm not sure what the future of
peer-to-peer will hold for live music collectors, but things are changing.
The technically advanced people are migrating to the new distribution
forms leaving the trees, weeds, and vines for the far less technical
traders (ie. even more errors).
Below this is my own attempt to present a list of "low"
and "high" gen tapes in a chronological order. In fact,
this is only a very spontaneous collection of informations taken from
many sources (such as other Internet sites and private collections).
When I listed the tape, I based on its generation and length. The
things such as distortions, cuts etc. are removed from my list because
it's too hard to detect if the tape listed is exactly occured by one
of these problems or not. It also must be remembered that the trading
society is still treating by many ego trips so there is almost impossible
to to verify any generation for sure. Also, this is not a hoarders'
tape list but just what is available on the traders' circles. There
are many alternate tapes, mostly audience, that are not listed here
and I was unable to find and listed all of them so if you have any
new informations, please contact
me today. The length of each tape may also varies circa +/- 1 minute
or so.
Important note: It is stated that a digital on digital transfer is
not a generation as long as it has been properly done. Only analogue
transfers can be treated as a true generation. So in all my descriptions
I only indicated analogue transfers and when I listed digital transfer
(clone), I do it very occasionally and for special purposes.
One or more categories used on this list may include the following
symbols:
