2018 AXPONA Show Report: Music, Part 2

SHOW
by Jeff Wilson
May 03, 2018

Since forming Acoustic Sounds in 1986, Chad Kassem has had a huge impact on the audiophile world. Continually upping the ante, Chad launched Quality Record Pressings in 2011, and it quickly became a go-to vinyl pressing plant serving a distinguished clientele, including Chad Kassem’s audiophile reissue label Analogue Productions. Chad usually has so many irons in so many fires that I hardly know where to start, so I let him take the lead.

How’s AXPONA going?
I think AXPONA’s an awesome show. We really enjoy it. We think it’s turning out to be one of the better shows in the U.S. We’re seeing a lot of our old customers, and we’ve made a lot of new customers.

What was new at AXPONA this year?
There are more vendors, more customers. We like the venue.

You always have so many different projects. What do you want to tell people about 2018?
We want to finish our mastering lab. You know, we bought Doug Sax’s mastering lab. It’s 99.9 percent done. And in addition to the ten [record] presses we have now, we’ve got six presses that we’ve totally redone; we’ve been working on those the last three years. They’re 99.9 percent ready and we’re thinking it’ll be about a month for those too. So those are two huge things.

We’re also working on a new UHQR project, the Jimi Hendrix Axis: Bold as Love. The mono version is already sold out, and the stereo version, we have about a thousand left of those, but they’re going fast. Those are the really big three things: the mastering lab, the pressing plant, the UHQR. Also, the [reel-to-reel] tape is still new and still hot and selling.

Do you have an estimate on how soon the mastering lab will be ready?
We’re hoping in about a month [from AXPONA time].

How extensive is your catalog of reel-to-reel tapes?
We’ve done ten; they’ve sold quite well, and we’re doing nine more. Muddy Waters Folk Singer, Sonny Boy Williamson Keeping it to Ourselves, Art Pepper…I think it’s The New York Album or So in Love, one of those, Johnny Hartman, and then five classical albums—the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, Daphnis et Chloé, some of the top RCA classical titles.

What trends have you been noticing? In vinyl, for instance…
It’s continuing to grow. You know, we pressed thirty thousand Sergeant Pepper’s by The Beatles, and it hadn’t even been a month and they ordered another thirty thousand. Hendrix—we pressed all the Hendrix records, and they came out with a new album called Both Sides of the Sky. We pressed like twenty or thirty thousand of that; they sold, and a month later they’d already ordered another twenty or thirty thousand. But the great thing is, that new release of Hendrix made all the catalogs sell [more and faster]. They started ordering ten thousands and twenty thousands of the rest of the catalog just because of that new record coming out. It was interesting to see that that [release] could have such an effect.

Isn’t it the case that demand for vinyl is so high right now that you can’t press enough vinyl?
Yeah.

And the new presses will get worked to death right away?
Well, you just never know. It may take a lot of tweaking to get them [right]; you know what I mean? I’m hoping not, but my experience in everything in life has been that everything is way harder than it looks or seems and way more expensive, but we figure we’ve been tweaking on them along the way so we’re hoping that everything will go smoothly.

Tags: AXPONA

By Jeff Wilson

This will take some explaining, but I can connect the dots between pawing through LPs at a headshop called Elysian Fields in Des Moines, Iowa, as a seventh grader, and becoming the Music Editor for The Absolute Sound. At that starting point—around 1970/71—Elysian Fields had more LPs than any other store in Des Moines. Staring at all the colorful covers was both tantalizing and frustrating. I had no idea who most of the artists were, because radio played only a fraction of what was current. To figure out what was going on, I realized that I needed to build a record collection—and as anyone who’s visited me since high school can testify, I succeeded. Record collecting was still in my blood when, starting in the late 1980s, the Cincinnati Public Library book sale suddenly had an Elysian Fields quantity of LPs from people who’d switched to CDs. That’s where I met fellow record hawk Mark Lehman, who preceded me as music editor of TAS. Mark introduced me to Jonathan Valin, whose 1993 detective novel The Music Lovers depicts the battles between record hawks at library sales. That the private eye in the book, Harry Stoner, would stumble upon a corpse or two while unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of some rare Living Stereo platters made perfect sense to me. After all, record collecting is serious business. Mark knew my journalistic experience included concert reviews for The Cincinnati Enquirer and several long, sprawling feature articles in the online version of Crawdaddy. When he became TAS music editor in 2008, he contacted me about writing for the magazine. I came on board shortly after the latest set of obituaries had been written for vinyl—and, as fate had it, right when the LP started to make yet another unexpected comeback. Suddenly, I found myself scrambling to document all the record companies pressing vinyl. Small outfits were popping up world-wide, and many were audiophile-oriented, plus already existing record companies began embracing the format again. Trying to keep track of everything made me feel, again, like that overwhelmed seventh grader in Elysian Fields, and as Music Editor I’ve found that keeping my finger on the pulse of the music world also requires considerable detective work. I’ve never had a favorite genre, but when it comes time to sit down and do some quality listening, for me nothing beats a well-recorded small-group jazz recording on vinyl. If a stereo can give me warmth and intimacy, tonal accuracy, clear imaging, crisp-sounding cymbals, and deep, woody-sounding bass, then I’m a happy camper.