This will take a bit of time if you have a lot of records. Start with your favorite and work your way through the collection.

Rough Trade Records specialized in European post-punk and other alternative rock of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Founded on a thrift-store record collection the Rough Trade was an environment where you could just listen to music. The store became a hub for independent distribution as a headquarters for Punk’s revolt against mainstream music.

It’s a turntable built for rock,,, I mean from rock! Maybe records are older than I thought – stone ages? Check out Fred Flintstone and his pal Barney listening to a record and smoking Winston cigarettes. This is cigarette advertising at its finest. I wonder how long that needle will last.

Christian Marclay is somewhere between being a visual artist and being a musician. He explores the sounds that people don’t want. Check out Marclay as he manipulates and damages thrift store records to produce a performance of continuous loops. His art is the art of unintended sounds. – Tim Carr

A super new album. 20 fantastic hits. Original stars! How can you not buy a copy with those lightning effects? Kiss, Alice Cooper, ELO, and of course KC and the Sunshine Band, they were on just about every K-tel release. It was $5.99 for a vinyl copy and $7.99 for an 8-track tape? Wow! to [...]

Whoa! This looks like a good way to ruin a single – The Clash: Rock The Casbah on a vintage Newcomb record player. These players were popular in classrooms. If only the teachers would have played The Clash! By order of the prophet We ban that boogie sound Degenerate the faithful With that crazy Casbah [...]

Led Zeppelin vinyl played on an old stereo turntable with a broken speaker. This is how I remember the music sounding. The hermit with the lantern is quite memorable too. The original painting was by Barrington Coleby, a friend of Jimmy Page, and is supposedly in a private art collection somewhere in the US. So [...]

Check out a side of John Coltrane: A Love Supreme.

I’ve been using the Popsike website to check out the value of collectible records. I’ve heard there is a Popsike iPhone app although I haven’t been able to find more info on it. Does anyone know about a Popsike app? Or a similar app to help determine the value of a record? This would be [...]

To Have & To Hold is a 90 minute feature documentary exploring all that is vinyl. The pilot features interviews with Chuck D, Questlove, Danny Krivit, Bruce ‘Bluenote’ Ludvall and others. The film is directed by Jony Lyle. “I think vinyl… vinyl. Vinyl. Vinyl. Vinyl. Vinyl. Vinyl… vinyl, you know. Is so cool. It’s because [...]

Oil prices could sink the vinyl record boom. Well at least the new vinyl record boom. Records are made of petroleum. And high oil prices are making it more and more expensive to press new records. The cost is being passed along to the consumer. The actual cost of manufacturing a record is much as [...]

Check out the vintage vinyl inspired artwork of Jeff Klarin and Rebecca Johnson at Bughouse Art & Design. “Our creative role as artist-designers allows us to subvert the expectations placed on functional objects and bring the expressive singularity of fine art to a larger audience by producing limited edition prints and paintings. We mine the [...]

Records are popping up everywhere – even the MoMA! This piece by Jonathan Monk is part of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Monk has matched a series of 12 album covers by The Smiths with a series of watercolor and pencil works on paper. Working within the realm [...]

Steve Wolfe meticulously re-creates everyday objects such as book covers and vinyl records to investigate the intersections among material culture, intellectual history, and personal and collective memory. Wolfe works in the tradition of trompe l’oeil and his pieces literally fool the eye on first inspection. The “Steve Wolfe On Paper” exhibit at the Anne & [...]

There are numerous articles online claiming vinyl record sales doubled in 2008. Apparently almost 2 million vinyl albums were sold beating out the previous record of 1.5 million in 2000. (That’s about the time Napster hit the street.) It has been reported independent music stores have sold a high percentage of these LPs. I’m seeing [...]

This 20th anniversary promo book marks one of the few times “Stairway To Heaven” was released as a single. The band’s recording label wanted to release the song as a single but the Led Zeppelin’s manager refused in 1972. With that decision record buyers began to invest in the fourth album as if it were [...]

Vinyl records do seem to be back. They’re popping up everywhere! So far this year vinyl record sales have increased more than 35 percent, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Apparently the iPod generation is fueling the resurgence. A younger, new-to-vinyl audience has discovered vinyl records sound better than digital files. The full article may be found [...]

Got a clever vinyl storage solution? Send a picture to home@latimes.com with your contact information. They will post the best ones on their site. Here is the full article.

Tired of getting burned by mediocre record purchases? Yeah,,, I know — sometimes the album covers are million times better then the music inside. Well here is a little app you can use to check out what is going on with a questionable LP. This program runs on the iPhone,,, you have an iPhone, right? [...]

Bob Dylan frogmarched by a cop who didn’t know what vinyl records are. The times they are a changing! She’ll know what records are soon enough.

I’m not sure how much time Obama has to be listening to records in the White House basement. If the presidential collection’s last update was in 1981 this may be a good time for a few additions. I’m thinking a proper welcome to Washington, DC would be a copy of Go Go Crankin’ Paint The [...]