Growing up in Lafayette, Chad Kassem found plenty of trouble. Eventually, a judge gave him a choice: jail or an out-of-state halfway house.
So Kassem moved to Salina, Kansas, and got a job as a cook at a diner. After a friend introduced him to the sonic joys of high-quality vinyl LPs, he started a mail-order business selling albums.
Forty years later, Kassem is, as the headline of a 2025 New York Times profile proclaimed, the “wizard of vinyl.”…