Hydraulic machines whooshed in a sprawling Kansas factory as melted vinyl squeezed through molded stampers like pancake batter, turning out fresh new albums about once a minute. Workers inspected the grooves for imperfections, fed album jackets into a shrink-wrapper and stacked the finished products on tall dollies for shipping.
Acoustic Sounds occupies a hodgepodge of squat industrial buildings in Salina, a city of about 50,000 near the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, where grain elevators and a gigantic frozen pizza plant jut out from the flat plains landscape. Over the last 15 years, this unassuming complex has become a leading manufacturer of the music industry’s most surprising hot format: vinyl LPs.
Pacing the floor was Chad Kassem, the company’s founder, who was bit by the audiophile bug as a 22-year-old who’d run into trouble with the law and now, four decades later, is a top player in the booming business of vinyl. Speaking in a slow drawl, but moving quickly on the ground, Kassem, 62, explained his obsession with making the best-sounding records possible — a never-ending pursuit that involves hunting down decades-old master tapes and making minute adjustments to tweak the temperature of an embryonic wad of polyvinyl chloride by a degree or two.
“What I’m all about,” he said, “is saving the world from bad sound.”
Introduced in 1948, vinyl LPs seemed destined for extinction by the early 2000s, if not before, as the music industry went digital. But over the last decade or so, the format has been reborn, embraced by fans as a physical totem in an age of digital ephemera, and by increasing ranks of analog loyalists who swear by its sound. Today, the symbol of the vinyl craze may be a rainbow of collectible LPs by pop stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish, which young fans snap up by the millions (though many may never be played). But on a chilly recent afternoon, Acoustic Sounds’ assembly lines were humming with albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Steely Dan and Lightnin’ Hopkins, in deluxe packages that go for up to $150 apiece.
Acoustic Sounds, founded in 1986, is Kassem’s umbrella for a group of interrelated businesses that form a nearly complete vinyl supply chain, including a mastering lab, a plating and pressing plant, a record label and a mail-order house. Almost entirely dedicated to reissues, the enterprise serves an affluent, global clientele that is constantly seeking out the newest, clearest-sounding, top-dollar reissue of a Muddy Waters or Dusty Springfield classic — and it has become a go-to partner for catalog-rich labels and artist estates.
“Chad’s attention to detail, his fanaticisms, are over the top — and his stuff sounds phenomenal,” said Jeff Jampol, who manages the legacies of the Doors, Janis Joplin and other classic acts.
Acoustic Sounds has pressed records by the Beatles, Queen, Jimi Hendrix and Kiss, and formed partnerships with major labels like Verve and Atlantic. In all, Kassem employs 114 people, and his Analogue Productions imprint releases a steady stream of more than 80 titles a year.
“I’m supplying the world,” Kassem said. “One little guy in Kansas.”
BEFORE HE BECAME a vinyl kingpin, Kassem was a thrill-seeking teenager in Lafayette, La., with a drug problem that landed him in a series of troubled-youth homes. Eventually, he said, his rap sheet grew long enough that a judge gave him a life-changing choice.
“I had 16 felonies,” Kassem said. “I either had to go to jail or a halfway house.”
He chose a halfway house in Salina, far from the temptations of home, and took a job as a cook at a roadside diner. Soon after, a friend introduced him to audiophile vinyl — high-quality originals and specialty remakes that revealed more depth and detail in the music than were evident on most mass-market releases. It was 1984, the dawn of the CD era, but Kassem describes the discovery as his Damascene moment, the first step in a lifelong quest to find sonic perfection on a 12-inch grooved disc. He maintains nothing but disgust for digital music.
“I mean, you put on a CD and even dogs leave the room,” Kassem grumbled, tucked in a booth at the restaurant where he once slinged short stacks. “I’ve never cried listening to a CD. I’ve never gotten goose bumps listening to a CD. But it happens sometimes listening to an album.”
He began dealing records by mail, and within a few years had annual sales of more than $1 million. In 1991, he started a reissue label, Analogue Productions, and by 2010 founded his own plant, Quality Record Pressings, or QRP. Kassem hired veterans of the record-making business and indulged their ideas for modernizing a process that had barely changed since the 1970s. Among other innovations, they introduced computerized controls and found ways to regulate the fluctuating temperature of vinyl in the presses.
Gary Salstrom, the former plant manager, is now at a rival facility but still praises Kassem for spending the extra dollar on improvements. “The goal,” Salstrom said, “was always to make the best record possible.” (In some ways, they were building on work done at premium pressing plants like Record Technology Inc. and Classic Records, a reissue label that Acoustic Sounds later acquired.)
At the same time, Kassem — who in his rumpled QRP hoodie and baggy, worn jeans looks more like a truck driver than a C.E.O. — was establishing a mini-empire in Salina. In a vacant church, he built a concert hall and studio where he recorded the Delta blues and Louisiana roots music that are dearest to his heart. His latest acquisition is a printing shop that makes farm-equipment manuals and inserts for Analogue Productions LPs.
Today, LP sales are now a $1 billion-plus market in the U.S. alone. High-end reissues are a lucrative niche within it, with new versions of the same old evergreens sold to the same collectors again and again.
One record on the QRP production line was “Fragile,” the 1971 prog-rock favorite by Yes, in a two-disc, 45-r.p.m. edition that sells for $60, as part of a series marking the 75th anniversary of Atlantic Records. It is Analogue Productions’ third iteration of that album in two decades, while Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, another reissue label, made a two-disc version as recently as 2019, and Rhino, Atlantic’s corporate cousin, offers its own “Fragile” vinyl. Labels know the value in feeding collectors’ endless hunt for the white whale.
“The fact that we can still beat some of the earliest, original pressings,” said Craig Kallman, a top Atlantic executive, “was the idea behind the Chad partnership.”
Kassem describes record-making as a process of constant industrial refinement and costly quality control. The company presses about a million finished records a year, he said, but rejects as many as 150,000 as not up to standards. When not peppering his talk with profanities, Kassem speaks in well-polished folksy aphorisms. “If you do it the best, you only cry once,” he said with a smirk.
OVER THE YEARS, Kassem has developed what he calls a simple recipe for making great-sounding records, which he contends most of his competitors are too cheap or too impatient to follow in full. First, he says, use the artist’s original master tape; no copies (and certainly no digital sources) are acceptable. Second, work with only the best mastering engineers. Third, use the best pressing facilities available.
Kassem’s zealous dedication to those guidelines has sometimes driven partners crazy. Jampol described being deep in negotiations over a reissue of the Doors’ first album, for which the original master was believed lost. Offered a digital copy, Kassem nearly blew up the deal. “He said, ‘Jeff, it’s got to be the analog original — the name of my company is Analogue Productions,’” Jampol recalled. Eventually the tape was found, and the reissue went forward.
Bernie Grundman, one of the industry’s most experienced engineers, said that most labels approve his work by listening to a lacquer master, a fragile disc used to make metal stamping parts. But Kassem goes so far as to press up test records before approving the lacquers, often with multiple rounds of changes. “Nobody else does that,” Grundman said.
But does all of this really make the music sound better? This is where the subjective interpretation of audio signals can turn into something like religion, one whose rites include harsh online debates. Skeptics often posit that vinyl’s appeal is a matter of nostalgia, if not outright delusion, and point to improvements in digital audio since the early days of the CD.
“Well, some people think the Earth is flat,” Kassem scoffed.
I compared Analogue Productions’ recent version of Steely Dan’s 1977 jazz-rock classic “Aja,” for example — pressed on translucent “clarity vinyl,” a proprietary formulation that the company claims limits surface noise — to a high-resolution streaming version of the album. The digital file, I have to admit, sounded very good. But to my ears, the vinyl had a vividness and an enveloping scale that simply felt more lifelike; the tactile crispness of Rick Marotta’s snare-drum smack on “Peg” drove it home. Some reviewers have called this the best-sounding edition of “Aja” available, comparable or even superior to the original. (Grundman cut the masters for both editions, 46 years apart.)Last year, the biggest-selling vinyl titles were by Swift, Eilish and other young pop stars like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter. None were made at Acoustic Sounds, which is devoted to music from decades ago. Poring over its catalog can feel like initiation into a cult of the old, albeit one with a fantastic songbook.
At his spacious home on the outskirts of Salina, Kassem showed off his basement listening room, crammed with rare vinyl and high-end audio equipment. Putting on disc after disc, with audiophile-grade sleeves strewn on the floor, he explained why he considered the post-World War II years the apex of sonic fidelity. To illustrate his point, Kassem played an Analogue Productions version of a 1950 recording by Duke Ellington. Although it had been recorded in mono, the sound emanating from Kassem’s speakers was powerfully real, down to the woody texture of the saxophone reeds on “Mood Indigo.” Kassem, practically shouting over the music, leaned down inches from my face.
“You play me a record from the last 20 years,” he exhorted, with some expletives, “that sounds this good.”
KASSEM IS HIS company’s official hype man, announcing each reissue campaign with excited but unfancy YouTube videos, grinning and nodding his head while flipping through LPs, as if he were savoring a Louisiana étouffée.
And it works. Since 2021, the company has sold more than 35,000 copies of Miles Davis’s 1959 landmark “Kind of Blue,” in boxed sets that went for $100 and $150. That success gave Kassem the idea for what he titled “Birth of the Blue”: four tracks that Davis recorded with the same players a year prior, which had been anthologized before but never given the full LP treatment. Kassem licensed the music from Sony — where Davis is a flagship catalog artist — and it immediately started flying off his warehouse shelves.
Next up is Bob Marley, whose catalog will be reissued by Analogue Productions in deluxe editions, after a deal with the Marley estate. “We got stuff coming that’s going to frost some people’s cookies,” Kassem touted.
Acoustic Sounds is one of a handful of specialty reissue labels that cater to discerning, deep-pocketed customers. It’s a small, competitive market in which versions of the same titles can be issued in succession, so each company’s process and marketing are paramount. One label, the Electric Recording Co., in London, specializes in low-run, artisan simulacra of old jazz and classical releases — down to letterpress-printed covers — that it sells for $500 or more.
Kassem takes diplomatic but pointed aim at Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi, his most formidable direct competitor. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was a pioneer of high-end reissues, laying much of the groundwork followed by later entrepreneurs like Kassem, whose early days as a collector-dealer were spent hunting down MoFi titles (and reselling his duplicates). But in 2022, the company was exposed for using an undisclosed digital step in what it had promoted as an all-analog process. The audiophile community exploded — many, many angry YouTube videos were made — and Mobile Fidelity settled a class-action lawsuit with customers the following year.
“They do things differently than we do,” Kassem said. “They believe that mastering from a digital copy is as good as mastering from the original master. How can a copy be better than the original?”
In a statement, a spokesman for Mobile Fidelity defended its process, and said that its digital step (now disclosed) offers various advantages: “For example, we can endlessly tweak it for levels, alignments and adjustments. None of this is possible with original analog master tapes, whose fragile condition subjects them to potential damage with each pass. Our approach represents the best of all worlds — and allows us to continue our role as historical caretakers that safeguard, preserve and respect the irreplaceable original.”
Even Kassem’s boosters say that he sometimes acts more like a fan than a businessman, sparing no expense on projects that he believes in. “It’s not a rational business model in some ways,” said Michael Fremer, the editor of Tracking Angle, an online audiophile publication, who has known Kassem since the 1980s. “It’s all heart and instinct. And it’s good on some level, and dangerous and overextended on another level.”
Kassem does not entirely disagree, though his longevity would seem to refute most doubt. “I’d rather lose money coming out with an album that will make your jaw hit the ground,” Kassem said.
“I’m doing what I love for a living,” he added. “I mean, what’s more satisfying than picking your favorite childhood record, getting the master tape and getting it to sound better than it’s ever sounded before? What’s better than that?”
The post The Wizard of Vinyl Is in Kansas appeared first on New York Times.
