I find it best to approach the '77 shows as performances by a band of equals, not "The Jimmy Page Experience" like it was in the early days. You had three world class instrumentalists on stage, but in most of the recordings from that year it's difficult, if not impossible, to hear much of what Jonsey and Bonzo were playing, so the shows get judged on what kind of night Jimmy was having (Robert being pretty consistent night to night on this tour.) Once you approach it like that, it's much easier to appreciate what a great band they were. And it helps a lot when the recording is fixed up so that you can really hear what JPJ and JHB were playing. It lets you understand how tremendous they were, both individually and as a rhythm section, and how well they supported and interacted with Jimmy. Unfortunately, that's only easy to do when the recording lets you hear the low end because that's where so much of the rhythm action takes place, but when you can it's kind of magical.

Prince doing Whole Lotta Love:

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You did a nice job with the research, but you might get a better response to this if you ask Sam (the webmaster) to move it to the Musician's Corner section of this site. The people there will understand what you're showing, where most of the audience in the main forum probably think Super Slinky is the title of a bootleg and assume the guitar strings were named after it. https://forums.ledzeppelin.com/forum/17-musician39s-corner/

I'm still putting the finishing touches on the 9/29/71 show (basically trying to tone down the cymbals on a few songs without killing the high end.) I've also started working on the 4/27/77 show. Here's a sample. If the whole thing sounded this good I'd be very happy, but I'm running into a technical problem on some of the songs that I need to figure out (quiet passages get compressed so hard they become inaudible.) I thought it would be easy to fix but it's proven to be more of a pain than I hoped. I have a link for this one song, but not the rest of the show yet. PM if you want a lossless copy of the full song.

Jimmy SAKURAI and band recreating the look and sound of No Quarter from Knebworth. Thanks to Mescalero at the hotel for finding this.

Led Zeppelin has a YouTube channel with a playlist of rare videos of live performances:

Thanks. I'll probably release the version you heard in the sample, but I always try some things at the last minute before I release a show to see if I can make it a little better. That's where I'm at right now with this one. Eventually I'll realize I should just leave well enough alone, but I like driving myself insane tweaking something that doesn't need tweaking

I don't think I ever finished it. It was more of an experiment to see if modern audience DAT recordings are easier to work with in a matrix than analog tapes from the '70s. Turns out they are a lot easier. There was no speed variation at all between the DAT and the soundboard from the show.

Thanks. The only luck I've ever had synchronizing anything was a Japan 1996Page/Plant show. That was easy because the two sources ran at the exact same speed, so it was just a matter of lining them up at the start of each song and then they would stay together for the duration. I tried doing the same thing with some Zep shows but the audience tapes never line up with soundboards, and even if you can get them in synch, they often quickly drift apart. That's one of the main reasons I started focusing just on remastering soundboards. I really like the way the crowd noise brings life to a matrix, but I just don't have the patience to do them.

Thank's. It's taken me almost two years to get it to sound like that, although two-thirds of that time was before the I found out how to remix it into stereo. I wish I could do these things more quickly and get the same sound quality, but it just never works out that way.

Sample of the 9/29/71 stereo remaster. I just need to tie up a couple of loose ends and then I'll post it.

If anyone wants a slightly better looking version of this with the same audio, send me a message.

There's a Musician's Corner section of this site where you might get more interest in this kind of thing: https://forums.ledzeppelin.com/forum/17-musician39s-corner/

The first true soundboard I heard was on the Final Touch / Last Stand CDs of the 7/7/80 show. I found them, along with the rest of the Toasted / Condor silvers, at a small record shop when they were first released. I knew they were boots but didn't know much about the '80 tour. Picked that show because it was Zep's last with Bonzo. I didn't love the sound quality, and am still not a fan of the '80 soundboards, but was very happy to hear the show given it's sentimental value and the killer version of Whole Lotta Love.

Wow, that's great. So cool to see how they created the flashes of light during the bow solo. Thanks to all involved for making it available.

Ann Wison talks about performing Stairway at the Kennedy Center Honors:

https://www.ledzeppelin.com/photos

Sure. Check your messages.

Mothership UK TV ad:

JJ Jackson doing a promo for the Eagle Rock Festival, which was later cancelled: German ad for the BBC Sessions: TV ads from 1976 for The Song Remains The Same: Remasters TV ads:

The hard part about working with recordings is they're all impacted by the system through which they're played and all systems are different. If you ever look at a picture of a professional sound studio you'll see they have a bunch of different speakers. The reason for that is so they can hear how a song sounds on a variety of speakers. If it only sounds good on expensive speakers then they need to work on it some more because most people are listening on less expensive speakers or cheap headphones or in their car with all the road noise. One of the most common speakers you'll see in a studio, at least older ones, is the Yamaha NS10. Apparently they sound terrible, but the thought was that if you could make a song sound good on them, it would sound good on anything. https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story

I sent you a PM about my system. One of the things I struggle with is that I can never know what one of my remasters will sound like on another person's system. The biggest issue is the bass. I'm trying to make it have a big impact without being bloated and that's a fine line to walk. My solution to that problem is to listen to each remaster I'm contemplating releasing in my car and on our home theater system, in addition to the system I use during the remastering process. The car stereo is the stock unit that came with the car and isn't great, but it's good at telling me if the bass is overwhelming. And the home theater is good at letting me know how it will sound on a conventional stereo (as opposed to the desktop system I use for remastering.)

It can take a lot of time. For me, one of the main reasons is the "bootleg ears" phenomenon where your hearing adjusts to whatever you're listening to. I've got dozens of versions of each show I've remastered that I thought were great only to listen to them later to realize they weren't even good, much less great. Another issue is that it's very easy to make something sound different, but determining whether the change was an improvement or not is hard. What would help is having some sort of standard to measure against. The official live albums seem like they'd work for that, but which one? If you go with The Song Remains The Same, do you use the version from 1976 or one of the later ones? And they sound different than How The West Was Won, which also has an original version and a later one. Not to mention Celebration Day, which sounds radically different than the other two. And then what about the audio from the official DVD, which has performances from a variety of years that all sound very different from each other? I gave up on using any of them, probably to my detriment, unless I'm working on something that is from one of those shows or right near them in time. Luckily, most of remastering is a blast. My consistent experience is that the better you can make a show sound, the more it makes you appreciate how good the performance was. In the case of the '75 and '77 shows in particular, bringing out the low end really gives you the ability to hear much more of what Jonsey and Bonzo were doing and understand just how great they were as individual musicians and how well they worked together as a rhythm section. I think a lot of shows, especially the ones from later tours, are judged solely on Jimmy's playing, not just because he's the guitarist in a form of music that's guitar-based, but because his instrument is pretty much the only one that was adequately captured in the recordings we have from those shows. When you remaster them and give everyone in the band a chance to shine, you get to appreciate just how great the band was, and that even in the latter years which might not be held in as high esteem as the earlier ones you still had three world class instrumentalists giving it their all each night, playing at a level that most musicians could never dream of. Which makes all of the headaches that come with remastering totally worth it.

Wow, tmtomh did a really nice job of explaining the details. I do use an exciter on each remaster, although I'm trying to use it less than I did when I first started out because it definitely solves some problems and causes others. The main thing that determines a lot of the final result is what the person who is doing the work is trying to achieve. Some folks want to bring out the best of each tape, particularly for audience recordings where a lot of time and effort was put into tracking down the master or low gen copy. Because of that, they'll limit their efforts to trying to fix problems with the tape without totally changing how it sounds. This is relatively straightforward when you're working on a single tape. However, it can get complicated when multiple sources are merged together and you need to fix different problems on each one while also giving them a sense of cohesion so the sound doesn't change radically from one source to the next. I work primarily on soundboards. My goal isn't to improve the sound of the source but to fundamentally transform it so the final result gives some tiny fraction of a hint of what it would have been like to be in the arena the night of the show. It's an impossible goal, but it's what I'm shooting for and it calls for a much more radical approach than I would use if my aims were different. And a lot of my results are dependent on the tour the soundboard was taken from. For example, the '75 and '77 shows are pretty easy to work with. The ones from '73 are harder but not impossible. Most of the ones from the very early '70s (Orlando '71, etc.) don't sound too good, although I am happy with the 9/29/71 remaster I'll be releasing soon. And the 1980 shows just don't come out well at all. I'm not sure why, but no matter what I do to them they never sound much different than they did before I worked on them.