Led Zeppelin Live CD/DVD Due 8 November

No way. Recording every show via multi-track would have been a significant undertaking and a major financial burden. Of course they could have technically done it, but why would they have wanted to part ways with significant amounts of touring revenue just to line the archives up with professionally recorded concerts? There was no reason to record endless amounts of shows.

 

Really? Some of those '77 LA tapes (the four nights Mike Millard recorded from like the sixth row) beat out just about any official live album for me. The performance is captured with perfect clarity, yet you also get the arena ambience as well the 'audio verite' of the audience ("'Heartbreaker'!!!!!")The problem with the 1977 soundboard tapes that circulate is the sloppiness in the playing comes through with a little too much clarity It is too bad that other than the L.A. Millard tapes only a handful of other audience recordings are decent (April 28 and May 30 come to mind) but fortunately they're also pretty good shows. We've had that Destroyer soundboard of the April 27 Cleveland show for years but the audience tape of the next night is a way better performance, two different bands, almost

With proper editing, it is possible make a kick a-s 2CD set of the L.A. shows just based on the audience tapes. I've done it; chopping out most of the 'Plantations' and editing down the looooooong solos (between "No Quarter", "White Summer", "Out On The Tiles/Moby Dick" and Page's infamous 'Noise' solos there's at least an hour's worth of self-indulgence right there!) can give you a Led Zeppelin live album IMO that could easily suffice as How The West Was Won II.

 

As PacificOceanBlue already posted it's not practical to record that many shows on multi-tracks.

As for seeing the future...if they could I'm not sure they would have bothered anyway. I don't think anyone in the Zeppelin camp is really sitting around thinking "I wish we had more multitracks". We care more than they do!