SALINA — Chad Kassem will celebrate 40 years in business with the Vinyl Summit next week.
The event from Oct. 15-18 offers attendees the opportunity to tour the offices of Acoustic Sounds in Salina, the business Kassem started from a tiny Salina apartment while working as a cook.
They can also catch concerts at Blue Heaven Studios, the former church he converted into a recording studio and performance space after he purchased it in 1996, and tour Quality Record Pressing, where he oversees deluxe reissues and pressings of audiophile-quality records that have earned him a reputation as the best in the business.
There’s also a record fair and live music each day, culminating in a concert on Oct. 17 at Salina’s Stiefel Theatre with Taj Mahal and Jimmie Vaughan & The Tilt-A-Whirl Band with Bernard Allison. A full schedule of events is available at vinylsummit.com.
Meeting Kassem at the Acoustic Sounds building in mid-August, one can quickly see that his main motivating factor has been his passion for music.
In some ways, his is an unlikely story, but one that’s been told in the pages of Billboard magazine and The New York Times, on various record-collecting podcasts, and on morning network news shows.
After he landed himself in legal trouble in his home state of Louisiana, he was sent to Salina in 1984 and lived in a halfway house. As his penchant for trouble dissipated, his passion for music increased, though he wondered what he’d do next. He was living in a tiny apartment and working for minimum wage as a cook.
Before long, he turned his passion for music and eye for a rare but important find into a side hustle. Heis decided to launch a mail-order business built on vinyl records, and that’s about when record labels were moving toward compact discs as the dominant form for recorded music.
The business grew quickly. Kassem would get phone calls in the middle of the night from European vinyl enthusiasts who wanted to buy records.
As the ‘80s transitioned into the ‘90s, vinyl occupied increasingly less room on retail floors, and some veteran acts who had risen to popularity in the age of the LP watched as their latest releases were only issued on cassette and CD.
It became relatively easy to find used vinyl at affordable prices. But turntables — once a centerpiece of family living rooms and teenagers’ bedrooms — were harder to come by. They were relics that often collected dust in basements or on the shelves of secondhand shops.
Not everyone bought into the CD boom. Some artists complained that digital formats flattened the listening experience, and that older recordings issued on the new format were inferior. This didn’t stop fans from buying deluxe box sets and CD reissues of their favorite albums, which were sometimes augmented by outtakes and rarities.
And while CDs reportedly didn’t scratch or skip as easily as vinyl records, some consumers complained that they lacked warmth, while others bemoaned the disappearance of certain titles.
Kassem understood that music fans were passionate about their favorite recordings and that classical, jazz and blues fans, in particular, were eager to scoop up freshly minted copies of recordings that had vanished from retail spaces. He learned that he could license those recordings on high-quality vinyl and sell them to enthusiastic lovers of Etta James, Muddy Waters and Debussy.
This was the founding of Analogue Productions in 1991, well over a decade before the vinyl medium experienced a commercial resurgence. Kassem may not have been able to predict the future, but he learned that by giving consumers what they wanted at the highest possible quality, he would build trust and, ultimately, loyalty.
If you spend time with him at Acoustic Sounds, you notice his talent for recognizing small but important details. He speaks to employees like friends, alternating questions about family members with reminders about upcoming deadlines. And although he has discriminating tastes, he shows equal respect for the recordings he reissues, whether they be classical, blues, or jazz.
At the Acoustic Sounds offices, you can find records by the score, some of them purchased in large-scale buys, some of them pressed at Kassem’s Quality Record Pressings, some of them accumulated over his own decades as a collector, and each treated with the reverence one would expect.
The attention to detail is also evident at Quality Record Pressings, where a variety of LPs are pressed and readied for shipping. There, staff assemble box sets of The Who’s classic LP “Who’s Next.” They’ll ultimately ship 7,500 copies of the record worldwide on 200-gram vinyl (180 is considered audiophile quality) in Acoustic Sounds’ signature boxes. Each LP in that series has been remastered from the original analogue tapes. The releases are pricey – most retail for $150 dollars – but for the discerning collector, it’s a small price to pay.
But it’s not just the records themselves. Kassem and his staff reject album covers with seemingly small imperfections. While consumers might come across records in their favorite shops that have hairline scratches or other imperfections, those won’t be things that left the QRP plant.
The vinyl resurgence that began around 2006 has continued to grow in recent years, making the collector’s market increasingly competitive and niche. And while some plants and record companies concern themselves with increasingly flashier packaging and limited-run vinyl variants, Kassem stays focused on what has drawn his customers to him in the first place.
He does not deliver products for the casual enthusiast who will set aside a record soon after they purchase it, or allow it to become a dust-covered artifact. Instead, he knows that he’s giving music lovers that thing they all want — records that sound and look exquisite and whose value, in the end, cannot be measured.