The official Live albums

[dustyvalentino]

Well, sound quality is subjective, but for my money mobile live Dire Straits recordings made live for tv or radio broadcast are never going to sound better than Beatles recordings made in AbbeyRoad 20 years previously. They always sounded great sonically.

The Stones 60s records sound poor in comparison, but they have other qualities - kind of like the difference between listening to the album Sultans and the single.

Anyway, are you going to listen to the shitty sounding Industrial Disease they put out on the live box or Tunnel of Love from the BBC album and try to argue that all official live DS sounds amazing?!

[Chris W]

I wasn't actually talking about Now and Then, they have used AI to go back and create new stereo versions of the older tracks.

They're still using Peter Jackson's exclusive audio lab to do the processing.
It's not an issue of badly recorded drums or slightly trashy guitars on earlier Dire Straits live tapes.It's more the weird phasey audio you often get with software separated audio tracks.
The technology isn't there yet, until maybe the Peter Jackson tools become more widely available.

[tobi777]

Anyway, are you going to listen to the shitty sounding Industrial Disease they put out on the live box or Tunnel of Love from the BBC album and try to argue that all official live DS sounds amazing?!

These are just a few exceptions. Most of the recent official recordings sound great to me - thanks to Guy. I never said that ALL of them sound like that. The fact that you pick out these few songs as examples shows that we are used to a high standard.
But anyway, you have your opinion, I have mine.

[the visitor]

Just discovered that Thin Lizzy, after releasing a Deluxe Edition of Live and Dangerous with extra material,  then in 2023 several years later released a SUPER Deluxe edition featuring all concerts used for the making of the album and a whopping 9hrs 55min of music.   The completest in me would hope for something similar for Alchemy, BIA and OES tours. 

[vgonis]

Sorry to be less enthusiastic, but with so much good music out there, they need a lot of "get-a-life-rs" to buy expensive products, that have already heard a gazillion times on bootlegs. I don't know what the numbers say with recent releases, but until technology makes it easy and cheap to transform lousy audio to wonderful natural sounding experiences, the mystic of poorly recorded bootlegs will remain intact.