Best Live Recordings:Performance and recording

Hot Tuna - "And Furthurmore"
The Other Ones - "Only the Strange Remain"

These are both done in HDCD and sound incredible - staging, bass extension, vocal clarity are all *excellent*. As a bonus, you can find them pretty cheap (< $10) on the internet if you don't mind used media. If you haven't heard an HDCD-encoded disk, you oughta...

Jazz at the Pawnshop.

Brand X "Livestock". Totally awesome performance and recording. It's almost impossible to believe that these guys are pulling off a performance like this live on stage. It is so quiet in the audience, that you don't even realize it's live, until after the song the audience goes crazy.

Astor Piazzolla: The Lausannne Concert. A beautiful, passionate performace recorded with with an ear for artistry and not a test record.

In the good old days an artist's live recordings almost never sounded as good as his or her studio records. Brand X Livestock was a big exception. Some live instrumental rock recordings have succeeded in ratcheting up the ante a few notches. Massacre/Meltdown, Jonas Hellborg/Personae, Zony Mash/Live in Seattle and Harriet Tubman/Prototype come to mind.
In recent years, there's been an explosion of stunningly realistic live jazz recordings in the racks... a few highly deluxe examples:
Bluiett Baritone Nation/Libation...
Yannick Rieu/Sweet Geom
Lounge Lizards/Live in Berlin (Vol.1&2)
Charlie Haden/Montreal Tapes (all are excellent)
Mark Helias/Fictionary
Tony Oxley/Floating Phantoms
Rich Halley/Live at Beanbenders
Ellery Eskelin/One Great Day
Archie Shepp-Roswell Rudd/Live at the Village Vanguard