Meet Chad Kassem, the man who wants to glow-up your vinyl collection

“I’ve got a big sign in the other room,” says Chad Kassem, “where we took an article, blew it up and put it in a frame. The headline says, ‘Why Salina?’ – because I get asked that question about a hundred times a year.”

Kassem, the founder of ultra-high-end vinyl record manufacturer Acoustic Sounds, is speaking to The Blend from the company’s headquarters in the aforementioned city in Kansas. He grew up in Louisiana’s action-packed Lafayette but chose to start a new life in this obscure former cow town (population circa 46,000), at random, in his early twenties. A troubled kid with a drug problem that helped to earn him 16 criminal charges, he could have moved anywhere in the world to try and get clean.

So… why Salina?

The 63-year-old cracks a wide grin. “Why not?”

It’s certainly an unlikely place to start a business that had garnered annual sales of more than $1m within a few years and has gone on to become a major player in the global vinyl revival. 2026 marks the 40^th anniversary of Acoustic Sounds, which Kassem first launched as a mail-order vinyl retailer. By 1991, he’d founded Analogue Productions, the reissue label that specialises in audiophile pressings of classic albums by the likes of Etta James and Muddy Waters.

In terms of sound quality, Kassem’s records – which he presses at his own plant, Quality Record Pressings, in the Salina headquarters – are as good as it gets. Compared to streaming, he says, they are “cleaner, clearer, smoother, more realistic”. With near-religious fervour, he typically remasters albums from the original master tapes, which often have to be tracked down, and only world-class studios and engineers will do. This can come with a hefty price tag: some limited-edition releases reach up to $150 (£110) a piece.

Even as vinyl becomes ever-more expensive thanks to that much-trumpeted revival, this is pretty unheard-of for brand-new reissues. “We try our best to make the best,” Kassem says in his slow, Cajun drawl. “We’re not too cheap to pay attention. Everybody’s trying to cut corners in life. That’s not what my customer wants. They want me to be the one not to cut corners.”

And who is that customer? “Someone that cares an awful lot about hearing their favourite artist sound as good as possible and is willing to pay extra to be able to hear and feel that.”

The company is currently toasting its fourth decade with The Acoustic Sounds 40th Anniversary Series, having raided the archives of Warner Music Group’s catalogue label Rhino Records to release two timeless albums every month throughout 2026. Already they’ve put out reissues of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Moondance, with the likes of The Ramones and Gram Parsons yet to come.

In October, Kassem will also host a jazz and blues festival at Quality Record Pressings, flying the likes of acclaimed saxophonist and trumpeter Chico Freeman over to Salina to celebrate the company’s success. It’s quite the vindication of his decision to start a vinyl label, which seemed highly questionable in 1991.

“When I first got to Salina,” he notes, pointedly, “it was 1984, the same year that CDs came out.”

Kassem was originally shipped to the city to stay in a ‘halfway house’, a transitional living facility for those on parole or recently released from prison, following yet another scrape with the law. A judge gave him a choice: it was that or jail. He’d previously lived in a halfway house in Iowa, but this one’s quietude appealed after the temptations of his hometown: “A lot of bars in Louisiana are 24 hours. When you’re 12 years old, you can buy beer. It’s just the way we grew up, but some of us can’t handle it – and I was one of ‘em. I got arrested a lot. I would get drunk, start shit, get in trouble. I dealt a little bit of drugs.”

Kassem understandably doesn’t seem keen to dwell on the past and skilfully turns the subject back to his passion: “[Selling drugs] isn’t much different to selling records. I sold records so I had more – buy three, sell two. Buy, sell, trade, keep your profits.”

Indeed, he was back in Louisiana when an old partying buddy introduced him to audiophile vinyl, imploring him to listen out for small differences in sound, explaining, “Subtle is big.” For Kassem, this changed everything. “I owe the guy,” he admits, before adding, quietly, “although he’s passed away from drugs.”

Upon his return to Salina, Kassem set about rebuilding his vinyl collection; in fact, it turned out, he was rebuilding his life: “A lot of my records, I had partied with, so they were rough. I had used them to roll joints on and partied all night with them.” Around this time, he worked as a cook and in a lightbulb factory owned by Philips, the company that helped to invent CDs, the technology that was supposed to put vinyl out to pasture for good.

That didn’t pan out, clearly, given that sales of the format surpassed $1bn (£790m) in annual revenue in the US last year, a figure not seen since 1983. In 2023, it was reported that UK vinyl sales had reached 5.9m units, their highest level since 1990. On both sides of the Atlantic, vinyl now easily outstrips CDs in terms of annual revenue as the unlikely comeback of black wax continues to gather apace.

“Here’s some quotable shit,” announces Kassem, a true raconteur. “I didn’t know this day was coming, but I spent every moment of my life, and every dollar that I had, as though I did.”

He believes people are simply realising that vinyl sounds better than other formats. Kassem is particularly scathing about streaming platforms, which he says engineers are catering to with a homogenised, “compressed” sound: “It kills the music.”

Either way, Kassem was well ahead of the curve, as he began buying and selling vinyl for fun before officially setting up his business in 1986. He now employs more than a hundred people, pressing around a million records a year and, he’s said, rejecting about 150,000 in his relentless mission for quality. His office, which is lined with shelves of vinyl, contains two turntables so that he can test pressings against one another, while he also scrutinises his records with a sound meter. “Nobody really does what I do,” he says.

Not many people, after all, would spend “25, 30 grand” on flying a small team, including himself, out to London’s Abbey Road Studios to remaster five Bob Marley albums, as Kassem did last year.

It’s a far cry from the ease of streaming, which, he argues, devalues the listening experience: “People consume way too much music. They listen all day long in the background. I believe the less you listen, the more you appreciate it when you do. If you’re gonna listen, fuckin’ listen. People say, ‘With an LP, you’ve gotta get up and flip it [halfway through].’ No, 20 minutes is the perfect amount for your brain to invest.”

To that end, 42 years since he came here to successfully get sober, Kassem is installing a record store at the Acoustic Sounds headquarters in Salina. Even back then, he says, “I knew vinyl would never die.”