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KASSEM IS HIS<\/strong> company\u2019s 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 \u00e9touff\u00e9e.<\/p>\n And it works. Since 2021, the company has sold more than 35,000 copies of Miles Davis\u2019s 1959 landmark \u201cKind of Blue,\u201d in boxed sets that went for $100 and $150. That success gave Kassem the idea for what he titled \u201cBirth of the Blue\u201d: 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 \u2014 where Davis is a flagship catalog artist \u2014 and it immediately started flying off his warehouse shelves.<\/p>\n Next up is Bob Marley, whose catalog will be reissued by Analogue Productions in deluxe editions, after a deal with the Marley estate. \u201cWe got stuff coming that\u2019s going to frost some people\u2019s cookies,\u201d Kassem touted.<\/p>\n Acoustic Sounds is one of a handful of specialty reissue labels that cater to discerning, deep-pocketed customers. It\u2019s a small, competitive market in which versions of the same titles can be issued in succession, so each company\u2019s process and marketing are paramount. One label, the Electric Recording Co., in London, specializes in low-run, artisan simulacra<\/a> of old jazz and classical releases \u2014 down to letterpress-printed covers \u2014 that it sells for $500 or more.<\/p>\n Kassem takes diplomatic but pointed aim at Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi, his most formidable direct competitor. In the 1970s and \u201980s, 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<\/a> in what it had promoted as an all-analog process. The audiophile community exploded \u2014 many, many angry YouTube videos were made \u2014 and Mobile Fidelity settled a class-action lawsuit with customers the following year.<\/p>\n \u201cThey do things differently than we do,\u201d Kassem said. \u201cThey 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?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n