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 a small part of Led Zeppelin's
live catalogue was covered), the only way to purchase 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 also very often occurred by tape noise, cuts and distortions.
Only a very small amount of the original master tapes are survived.
Most of them have been lost or destroyed accidentally and high generation
copies 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 are 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 have been 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 had 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 problem seems to disappear completely when we talk about
free sharing of audio and video recordings through dedicated servers
as well as through private trade. Even with little advancement in current
technology, collectors now have a unique opportunity to obtain and share
recordings through free torrents, which require absolutely minimal knowledge
and are by definition free from errors that were the nightmare of trade
times by physical media.
Below this is my own attempt to present a list of "low" and
"high" generation tapes in a chronological order. When I listed
the tape, I based it on its generation and original 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 vary between themselves being
the same generation. The length of each tape may also vary a bit.