It's got The Wanton Song as part of the live set, and the song is cut... seems just like the Minneapolis SBD to me.I'll bet it's authentic.

The current site owner recently got access/full control of the site - so it's not clear why it has disappeared.

All fixed now.

The easiest way to get it is to search for the Japan FM or Japan digital radio version. It's missing about a minute of the four minutes' worth of Honey Bee, but otherwise the Whole Lotta Love medley is complete. And the sound is very good.

Physical Graffiti, without a doubt. It has everything - the light and shade, hard electric blues, funk, beautiful acoustics, long epics, fun goofs, the whole nine yards. Also, if you break it down between the 1974 tracks and the other tracks, the early tracks make up one of the best outtakes albums of all time (The Rover, Houses of the Holy, Down by the Seaside, Night Flight, Boogie with Stu, Black Country Woman). Meanwhile, the 1974 tracks - the tracks they came up with just for that album - are incredible: Custard Pie, In My Time of Dying, Trampled Under Foot, Kashmir, In the Light, Ten Years Gone, The Wanton Song, Sick Again. There's not a weak or even so-so track in the bunch. And it includes not one or two but three long epics, plus arguably the best ballad they ever did (Ten Years Gone). All that said, Led Zeppelin III is a close second for me. And How the West Was Won is one of the best live albums in all of rock history.

Great info from Steve! On a more basic level, mono and stereo audience and soundboard sources have been "remastered" for a long time. The most common technique is probably EQ, changing the frequency energy with an equalizer plugin or a similar tool. Graphic EQ can boost or cut specific frequency ranges to alter the overall balance of the source, adding high-end sparkle, cutting excessively boomy low end, or boosting or cutting the midrange to change the loudness of much of Plant's vocals and Page's guitar relative to Bonham and Jones. Parametric EQ allows more fine control over the frequency range that's boosted or cut, and is often used to, for example, add some snap to the snare drum without altering the overall sound of the midrange, or to tame an overpowering bass frequency without cutting the overall level of bass on the recording. When the source is a stereo one, especially a soundboard where the stereo separation is clearly audible, some folks will also EQ each channel separately, to further contrast or clarify the instruments that are more dominant in each channel. That's sort of a "poor man's remixing." Conversely, if a stereo soundboard has excessive or bizarre separation, as a few of the older Zep soundboards do, folks will sometimes narrow the apparent stereo channel difference by doing a version of what Steve notes above, either narrowing the L-R spread in an audio editor, or else making a duplicate of the stereo source, flipping the channels, lowering the volume of the flipped version, and mixing it back in with the original. The result is added L-R channel crosstalk, which can "knit together" a source in the right situation. Beyond that, reverb is often added to soundboard sources, since most of them are "dry" and lack both the hall ambience and some of the reverb effects that might have been applied to the voice and instruments in the sound setup. Compression is also an oft-used technique. Somewhat similarly to parametric EQ, some of the most skilled fan remasterers will apply compression to multiple, relatively narrow frequency ranges (multi band compression) to liven up or sharpen up the sound without adding excess compression to the entire thing. Noise reduction is sometimes used to reduce tape hiss, although it's very easy to overdo this and many purists are against any noise reduction ever being used at all. Finally, there are a couple of less-often used techniques. One, which I believe Steve uses or has used in the past, is an exciter plugin. An exciter adds distortion to the signal, but it adds only even-order (or maybe just 2nd order, I can't recall) harmonic distortion, so what it's designed to do is increase the high end sparkle of a source by synthesizing sounds at double the original frequency of the sound. So if a soundboard tape has very little energy above, say, 7kHz (as is sometimes the case, especially with pre-1972 soundboards for Zep), an exciter can create 8kHz harmonics from 4kHz sounds, 11kHz harmonics from 5.5kHz sounds, 14kHz harmonics from 7kHz sounds, and so on. The restored harmonics extend the treble, brighten and liven up the sound, increase the body and volume (since new sounds are being added all over in the form of those new harmonics), and potentially increase the feeling of air and ambience (since 2nd order harmonics are known to increase the perception of ambience - which is why some folks like tubes in their stereos even though tubes are not as accurate as well-designed solid-state gear). The problem with exciters when used on something like a 1960s/70s soundboard tape is that the tape doesn't just have pure fundamental musical notes on it - it also has a ton of distortion, from Page's and Jones' guitar effects boxes, from the amplifiers (in that era the signal chain was often stage amp to stage mic to soundboard, so you had the amp and mic distorting the signal on the way), and from the original tape recorder and tape plus any tape copying steps over the years. All those distorted sounds get new harmonics generated by an exciter too, and sometimes the result can be a bunch of treble distortion that makes the entire thing sound like a hash. In some situations, though, and used judiciously, an exciter can produce an interesting effect. Another, even less-frequently used technique is highly effective but incredibly labor-intensive, and I know of only one guy who uses it: he samples the very brief transients when Bonham hits the snare drum and cymbals on an official live Zep release, and he goes through the entire bootleg soundboard source and inserts the transients whenever appropriate, literally restoring the missing treble transients that were either not recorded on the original tape, or have been lost as the tape was copied over the years. I can't even imagine how long it takes him to do that, but it works and it never sounds fake. And a third is adding audience noise to a soundboard source to better simulate the feeling of a live show or official-release live album. Typically the audience noise is either copied from elsewhere on the soundboard source (like at the very beginning or ending of the show), or else "flown in" from the between-song applause from The Song Remains the Same. It's usually faded up as a song ends, left up throughout the break and the beginning of the next song, and then faded out as the next song really gets going.

No full multitracks circulate (at least not openly). In addition to the Bonham tracks, there's a single multi of Plant's vocal on Since I've Been Loving You - but I've only seen the vocal track, never the other multis that make up that track.

Of course the June LA shows - all of them, but especially the first three nights. And yes to the NYC shows, although the latter ones are better than the earlier ones IMHO. Agree with Strider about late April - 4/27 Cleveland is a decent show with great sound, while 4/28 is a mediocre/okay AUD source but a stupendous performance. And then of course there's Pontiac 4/30, which sounds terrible but appears to have been an excellent performance. I'm also really partial to the final night in Landover, 5/30 - a great performance. And while I admit I'm influenced some by the stellar sound quality - arguably best sounding show of '77 - Fort Worth 5/22 is a really solid show too.

Night Owl's Blueberry Hill is something special. It's rather more than a simple matrix - Night Owl took all the good quality AUD sources and basically treated them like individual multitrack, mixing them into a stereo image and in some cases mixing only certain frequency ranges of each source (based on whether the source had better bass, or better midrange/treble clarity or extension, etc.) The result is a stereo effect that outdoes any other source with greater dimensionality. Highly recommended.

Actually, it was Dancing Days that the band felt sounded too similar stylistically to Houses of the Holy. They've also said they liked the idea of having the title track to the album... on a different album. So it's reasonable to presume that they preferred Dancing Days (either as a song, or in the running order of the rest of the album), and given that, thought it would also be cheeky to separate the song from its album namesake.

Same here.

Wow!

I'm sorry folks are for some reason unable to stay on-topic. I get what you're talking about. I have no definitive answer, but I have noticed that there are small differences between the CD/digital and vinyl versions on most of the live Zep reissues from 2014 through 2018. Some of these small differences come from vinyl-side timing limitations - for example the track order of the 1969 Paris show (Zep I 2014 reissue companion material) and How the West Was Won are both different on the vinyl than on the CD and other digital versions. The specific differences you've noticed on The Song Remains the Same might not be explainable in that way, but I've often wondered if some of these unnecessary small variations were some kind of artistic choice Page made (or John Davis made and Page signed off on or didn't notice), having to do with the different flow and feel of flipping vinyl sides vs playing an entire CD, Blu-Ray audio disc, or set of digital files through from beginning to end.

Davis did not remix the album.

Yes - and Down By the Riverside!

The 1994 remasters are based on the 1990 Box Set masters (for the 40 or so tracks that were on the 1990 set), but yes, they are different. Many of the tracks on the '94 CDs are identical to the 1990 Box Set versions but turned up about 1.4dB if memory serves, which results in some clipping. Other tracks, however, are more than just level-shifts: their dynamics are slightly less - they have higher average levels than the 1990 versions but their peaks are slightly lower than the 1990 versions. (Also, as an FYI, the 2003/2008 Rhino and Japan Definitive Collection box set with the cool mini-LP style packaging, is just the 1994 CD masterings turned up another 0.6dB.) Still the 1990 Box Set and 1994 CDs sound much more similar than different, as they are based on the same digital transfers of the tapes, and they were all (re)mastered by George Marino. There are literally hundreds of pages over at the Steve Hoffman forums comparing the 1980s, 1990s, and 2014/15 Zep masterings. There also is some discussion of the 1990 vs '94 tracks.

I'm not sure how we would even determine a truly objective ranking, but your list does hew somewhat close to the ranking of the albums by sales figures: IV II Houses I and PG (tied) III and ITTOD (tied) Presence Coda

PG is my #1, Zep III is my #2. After that it's tough for me: Zep I, II, and IV are basically tied, with Houses just behind them, and then Presence and ITTOD basically tied.

Anyone who ranks Physical Graffiti and Zep III among the top 3 Zep albums can't be all bad.

Yes, fantastic!

While it wasn't Zep, Tea for One was played at a couple of the 1996 Page & Plant Japan shows. There are great-sounding tapes and the performances are very good.,

The only difference is the extra 15 seconds (although for some reason I thought it was 11 seconds - but I could be misremembering). Unfortunately the mastering of that particular version is rather bad - I guess maybe it was compressed and EQ'd for AM radio play? It's also possible that the stereo image of the promo is narrowed compared to the normal album version. Some folks have tried to EQ/tweak the extra bit from a digital rip of that promo 7" and digitally splice it into the regular version with the aim of creating a better-sounding version with the extra stuff in it. But the promo 7" sounds so different than all the well-mastered pressings of the album version that no one has yet succeeded in making a sonically smooth result.

These, definitely.

Very cool - thanks for sharing!

Spot on.