cds

December marks 25 years of collaboration between music composer Danny Elfman and film director Tim Burton. The two first worked together on Burton's movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure in 1985 and were fast friends from then on, with Elfman composing the music for all but two of Burton's projects since then. Among Elfman's most famous works are the scores to Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow, and Alice in Wonderland.

In celebration of this iconic friendship Warner Bros is releasing a 25th Anniversary Music Box that contains more than 19 hours of music including fan-requested expansions of famous soundtracks and previously unreleased music. The package also includes CD art by Burton, a USB flash drive with MP3s of all the songs, and a DVD featuring an exclusive conversation between Burton and Elfman. The music box will be released this December in a limited edition of 1000 numbered units. $499.99

There's classical music and then there's Classical Music. Yo-Yo Ma defined the latter, carving out best-in-class recordings for the entire history of classical music. Now fans of this musical genius are given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own the definitive collection.

Yo-Yo Ma 30 Years Outside the Box, out now from Sony Music, features a mind-blowing 90 CDs, every original album Yo-Yo Ma has recorded to date (including 15 Grammy award winners) and two bonus discs featuring the first release of John Williams' Suite from Memoirs of a Geisha for Cello, all entirely re-mastered with DSD technology. The limited-edition, numbered set comes packaged in a velvet-lined cello box complete with a beautiful hard-bound book full of rare archival photos, essays and more.

Yo-Yo Ma created modern classical music, collaborating with artists from Bobby McFerrin to Mark O'Connor and Edgar Meyer, to recording his interpretations of an entire genre of music, with his groundbreaking Obrigado Brazil record. Throughout his career he has worked to bring classical music to young people. Such an extraordinary collection only befits such a legendary man. Give the music lover on your list this amazing collector's set, and trust us, they'll be set for life.

The entire collection retails for $789.98 and is available from Amazon.

We're giving away one lucky Luxist reader a selection of our top five favorites (total value $98.93):

Brahms: The Piano Quartets

Beethoven: Complete Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Vol. 1

Bolling: Suite for Cello and Jazz Piano Trio

Mozart: Divertimento, K. 563

Yo-Yo Ma Plays the Music of John Williams

To enter, leave a comment below on your favorite composer Yo-Yo Ma has recorded. Hint: It's basically all of them. Winners will be randomly selected. Contest ends Friday, December 18th at 7 PM EST. Good luck!

Some other important details:

* To enter, leave a confirmed comment below.
* The comment must be left and confirmed before December 18, 2009 at 7:00PM Eastern Time.
* You may only enter once.
* One winner will be selected in a random drawing.
* One winner will receive five albums from the collection, a total value of $98.93.
* Open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia.

See complete contest rules here.

The contest is now closed.

With electronics usually sporting black or silver color schemes, this gold SA-&S1 CD player from Marantz is setting itself apart with an appealing gold finish. It's not super shiny and it doesn't look like it's trying too hard, but is still gold, which is interesting. Put that with features like little to no sound-degrading vibrations, protection against electrical interference, and micro-precision metals making for an exceptionally clean data read-out, and it's a nice piece of electronics.

It's a good looking seemingly well-made CD player, but I don't know about paying $10,000 for it? Unless that's real gold used in the finish, then maybe...