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
mostly 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. Many transfers
varies between themselfs being the same gen. It also must be remembered
that the trading society is still treating by many ego trips so sometimes
it's very hard to verify the exact generation. There are many alternate
tapes that are not listed here so if you have any new informations,
please contact
me today. The length of each tape may also varies circa +/- 1 minute
or so.
Click the year
that you are interested in and try to choose the tape you are looking
for or just browse each section to find the one you are interested: