By Ben Sisario
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. 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 bitten by the audiophile bug as a 22-year-old 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 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. 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 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, Louisiana, with a drug problem. Eventually, he said, 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 at a diner. Soon after, a friend introduced him to audiophile vinyl. It was 1984, the dawn of the CD era, but Kassem describes the discovery as the first step in a lifelong quest to find sonic perfection on a 12-inch grooved disc.
“I’ve never gotten goose bumps listening to a CD,” Kassem said. “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 the process. Among other innovations, they introduced computerized controls and found ways to regulate the fluctuating temperature of vinyl in the presses.
Kassem describes record-making as a process of constant industrial refinement and costly quality control. The company presses about 1 million finished records a year, he said, but rejects as many as 150,000 as not up to standards.
Over the years, Kassem has developed what he calls a simple recipe for making great-sounding records. 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.
But does all of this really make the music sound better? 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 sounded very good, but to my ears the vinyl had a vividness that simply felt more lifelike. Some reviewers have called this the best-sounding edition of “Aja” available.
Kassem is his company’s official hype man, announcing each reissue campaign with excited but unfancy YouTube videos.
And it works. Since 2021, the company has sold more than 35,000 copies of Miles Davis’ 1959 landmark “Kind of Blue,” in boxed sets that went for $100 and $150. Next up is Bob Marley, whose catalog will be reissued by Analogue Productions in deluxe editions.
“We got stuff coming that’s going to frost some people’s cookies,” Kassem touted.
Even Kassem’s boosters say that he sometimes acts more like a fan than a businessperson, 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. “It’s all heart and instinct.”
Kassem does not entirely disagree. “I’d rather lose money coming out with an album that will make your jaw hit the ground,” he 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?”
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