In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick depicted a Pan American Airlines shuttle whizzing space commuters to an orbiting circular station, where they communicated with earthbound loved ones via a Bell Telephone videophone. Pillbox-hatted stewardesses served up vacuum-bagged space gruel sucked from straws.

During the great folk music revival of the 1960s how many buyers of Peter, Paul & Mary's stunning debut album knew who was the Reverend Gary Davis, writer of the apocalyptic side 2 opener "If I Had My Way"? Probably very few. In those days you'd have to visit the local library to find out who he was, assuming you paid attention to label credits in the first place.

What always felt like it would be a nasty bump in the Dylan Bootleg Series road turns out to be a smooth walk on the water thanks to a concept the Dylan boot team perfectly executes by covering the mutable artist's evangelical period with highly charged live performances, outtakes and rehearsals that will turn you into a believer, if not in Christ, then in Dylan's absolute commitment to what he then preached and in the power of the songs and especially the supercharged performances he delivered.

The website Reverb.com recently announced an open beta launch for Reverb LP. Backed by what it claims is "the world’s most popular music gear site", Reverb LP aims to be "the best place online to buy and sell records".

The most expensive record cleaning device in this video is Pro-Ject's $499 VC-S. That's good news! The other gizmos include the new Allsop Orbitrac 3, the Vinyl Vac (about $30 on Amazon.com), which is a wand that you use with a shop vac, and a few others.

Here are some gift-giving ideas for this holiday season that come late, but not too late! Among the suggestions are books, record cleaning accessories,records and vinyl boxed sets. The embedded video has more suggestions.

Comparing DIN-to-RCA phono cables is a daunting enough task without the distraction of watching a nation unable to figure out who it elected president, partly because it relies on 40-year-old punchcard technology to tally votes. Haven't election officials heard that digital is perfect?

2017 has been an amazing year for vinyl and an equally amazing one for AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer. He attended a Direct to Disc recording session at London's famous AIR Studios and during the same trip interviewed recording engineer Phill Brown and toured Rega Research. In a second London trip he visited SME and interviewed Pink Floyd's "The Wall" illustrator and balloon designer Gerald Scarfe. Later in the year after the Munich High End show he visited Pro-Ject's new Czech Republic factory and over the summer attended audio shows in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo. But the most exciting adventure was being an expert witness in the recently concluded Quincy Jones vs. The Estate of Michael Jackson lawsuit won by Quincy Jones.

Register to win a copy of ELO's 2LP collector's picture disc edition of Out of the Blue we are giving away.

According to the company:

"One of the indisputable masterpieces--and most commercially successful titles--in the ELO canon, Out of the Blue, the group's seventh studio album, was originally released in October 1977."

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

You don’t have to be a Blue Note fetishist to know that pianist Sonny Clark made at least one great and enduring album, the 1958 hard bop classic “Cool Struttin’, though the cult of Cool Struttin’ has driven up the price of original pressings to the $4000 range and higher.