As soon as his introduction is met with odd inmates' rapturous applause, his wry jokes and wild charisma are on full display as, in top-top form, he tells tales of murder and incarceration to galvanic crowd response. This intimate recording of Nirvana's performance for the MTV Unplugged series, released seven months after the passing of Kurt Cobain, is widely considered one of the best live records of all time.

It probably wouldn't have been had they simply followed the accepted format of stripping down hits to bare-bone acoustics, but in playing toned-down renditions of mostly lesser-known material and unexpected covers, they produced an intimate, candid performance that put Cobain's raw talent fully on show.

It is as alive, vibrant and fluid just listen to Dark Star It's safe to say Kraftwerk were a little late to the live album party. Minimum-Maximum wasn't released until , more than three decades after the electronic band first performed live. The Grammy-nominated album was worth the wait, though, with a predictably sublime, classics-rich setlist recorded during several dates on their world tour.

With minutes of music across three CDs, or four records, you're getting your money's worth here, folks. Quantity complements quality, as anyone who attended the date Hammersmith Apollo, London residency in will tell you.

Aretha Franklin's third live album is a gleaming advert for her raw vocal talent and prowess as a live performer. Full of life and a sense of occasion, as a live affair should be, it's a wonderful soul display, backed by the tremendous King Curtis' band. Fans of the Scottish post-rock quintet would probably agree that the year wait for a live release was worth it the day Special Moves hit the shelves.

Studiously comprised of one or two tracks from each Mogwai album released at the time, and patchworked from three recorded shows in Brooklyn, it is the format that perhaps best serves the band's brooding, stratospheric ambience.

Committing to the purchase? The extended CD package gets you six additional tracks as well as the tour's insightful live performance documentary, Burning , on DVD. This Grammy Award winner is an exhilarating example of Daft Punk's engineering artistry — a relentlessly buzzing montage of their most popular tracks executed in a minute set at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy.

You'll want a system or pair of headphones with pinpoint soundstaging for this one. Audiophile-wooing experimentation isn't restricted to the music on this ambient-cum-modern-classical album: "Some concerts were recorded on old portable reel-to-reel recorders, some on simple cassette tape decks… and others were more advanced multi-track recordings.

The by-product is the German composer's best work, from the opening echoic pummelling of electronica An Aborted Beginning to the dynamically diverse piano workout Said and Done and pensive keys above pattering rain Over There, It's Raining. A fan's next line of inquiry? The Erased Tapes hi-res collections.

John Williams is getting on for 86 years old and, if his latest soundtrack to the Star Wars saga is anything to go by, still going very strong indeed. As with the Hans Zimmer album above, we use a fair bit of John Williams' music in our testing process, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi seems destined to become another favourite.

Williams is a master of his art, and the dynamism of his music, with sweeping crescendos and vast amounts of light and dark, means any system is put through its paces strenuously.

Sometimes with live music, it all simply comes together; the venue, the setlist and the performance are all on point.

Still, that cannot take away from the immensity of these timeless recordings. A seminal album of the s, which in America sold around a million copies in its first week and stayed in the top 40 for nearly two years, Peter Frampton's iconic double live album came at an important time in his career.

He'd left Humble Pie to go solo five years earlier and had been only modestly critically and commercially received. That would all change soon after Frampton Comes Alive! It won't come as breaking news to many reading this that The Who's Live at Leeds is widely cited as one of the best live rock albums of all time. This on-campus classic — a performance played to students at the University of Leeds Refectory — could have never materialised, of course, had Pete Townshend not demanded that their sound engineer burn the tapes of the live recordings they had made from their many recent dates on the road.

Thankfully, their persistent wish to break away from their rock opera Tommy tour and show off the intensity of their live performance saw them book this Leeds gig on Valentines Day for the recording.

And the rest really is history. Young apparently wasn't all too enamoured with his second attempt at Universal Studios in Los Angeles the following February, either, but he allowed MTV to air it all the same.

Well, we like it, Neil. Both acoustic performances and setlist are peak Neil Young, with Harvest Moon , Long May You Run and the previously unreleased Stringman emotionally raw and melodically consistent.

Police training cited as defense in many use-of-force cases. But experts say it's outdated. What could our lives be like in ? After months of thorough work, our team is proud to announce we have reached the following conclusion: RecordingTheMasters is able to manufacture cassette tapes again.

Our story begins in May In addition, artists and independent labels are releasing new albums on cassette tapes. What a great opportunity, we thought. A lot of audiophiles, partners and friends asked our factory to develop compact cassettes as the former brands did in the past. We knew it would not be an easy journey. It did not matter, a lot of discussions and debates were engaged, and we finally decided to run the project. The truth is that we were desperately searching something useless.

We had everything we needed in front of us.

Sep 02,  · The album set a high quality-benchmark: great music, good audio. Like almost all bootlegs of the early s, it came in a white cardboard sleeve with a rubber-stamped title but no artist name. The most talked-about G.W.W. tracks were those recorded with The Band in , which were not officially released until , as part of The Basement Tapes.