The owners of a 14,000-square-foot record plant in the River North Arts District have finally found their groove.

After two years of delays, and a surprising breakup with their former partners at Denver’s Vinyl Me, Please record club, Paramount Pressing and Plating expects to be pumping out 1 million vinyl LPs per year once it hits full capacity, ranging from major-label reissues to boutique pressings of 200 copies for local artists.

But even as the company nears its first anniversary in July, it can already claim success in its mission to create some of the highest-quality vinyl records in the world. Its exacting standards are meeting a growing market of not just turntable audiophiles, its owners said, but younger fans who have made vinyl records the top-selling music media in the world for three years straight, beating out CDs and bringing in $1.4 billion in revenue last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, the highest amount since 1984.

Paramount’s pressing floor — in a high-windowed warehouse stacked with silvery machines, bags of vinyl pellets, and not much else — is overseen by industry veteran Gary Salstrom, whose work has already resulted in dozens of acclaimed releases from Paramount in recent months. That includes new and reissued albums from Gillian Welch, LCD Soundsystem, Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Soft Boys, Eagles touring guitarist Christopher Holt, Old Crow Medicine Show, and indie-supergroup Rilo Kiley.

“I found out they were going to build this plant in Denver with the Vinyl Me, Please folks attached, and a plan to bring Gary Salstrom on,” said David Rawlings, a Grammy-winning folk artist and co-founder of Paramount Pressing. “And eventually the (Vinyl Me, Please) folks behind it lost control of the board of directors and it fell apart.”

Paramount’s squat, blocky building at 4201 Brighton Blvd. sported a Vinyl Media Pressing logo as recently as last spring, but the fallout from VMP’s troubles brought it down. In a sign of internal struggle, the upscale record club that helped kickstart the current surge in LP demand last May filed lawsuits against its CEO and CFO for allegedly misusing company funds — and hiding the pressing plant from the board as a pet project.

Vinyl Me, Please did not respond to requests for comment.

“People would ask about Vinyl Me, Please, and it was very confusing,” said Jilliann Parker, head of Paramount’s operations, whose office wall is lined with new Paramount Pressing records. “Now, not so much.”

With Rawlings as the main investor, the pressing plant re-formed as an independent business and over the last few months has staffed up to a dozen or so specialists, with even more positions open at paramountpressing.com.Nashville-based Rawlings, the musical partner of acclaimed singer-songwriter Gillian Welch and head of Acony Records and its Woodland Sound Studios, is an ideal co-owner, Salstrom said. He’s an audiophile whose label specializes in rigorously manufactured, high-end vinyl releases — and a longtime customer of Salina, Kansas-based Quality Record Pressings, where Salstrom formerly worked.

When he first heard Salstrom was leaving Quality Record Pressings, Rawlings was told that it was very bad news for Acony. Rawlings, however, saw it as very good news for himself as it gave him the chance to collaborate with Salstrom on their own terms.

“My favorite thing, and one of the most frustrating things at the same time, is how many times over the years somebody’s listened to a test pressing and said, ‘I didn’t know it could sound that good!’” Salstrom said. “That’s been my mission all along, and why David and I get along so well. Why not make the best-sounding records you can make?”

“It’s really exciting that you can make a record here where it never turns into ones and zeroes,” Rawlings said, referring to his analog purism — or refusal to use software or digital intermediaries at any stage of the record-making process. “You record to an analog tape, and it turns back and forth from electricity to magnetism in the process of recording and pressing. … And eventually it pushes the speaker in the opposite way the microphone moved during recording. It’s all still waves.”

That results in a warmer, higher-fidelity listening experience, he argued. Turning those waves into physical media, however, is a complicated and multi-step process where minute variations make all the difference. It helps that Paramount is a turnkey operation — or one that combines the steps of mastering, plating, pressing and packaging, all the way down to shrink-wrapping. That gives Salstrom complete control over the entire process, which is exactly how he and Rawlings want it.

Paramount’s debut could hardly arrive fast enough. The market for quality vinyl has exploded over the last decade or so as old-school LPs have made a comeback, drawing mega-stars such as Taylor Swift, Charli XCX and Chappel Roan to embrace the format. That in turn has pushed sales even higher as younger music fans jump into the turntable lifestyle. Even though the newer LPs cost around $30 to $40, the scant remaining pressing plants around the globe can’t pump them out fast enough, Salstrom said.

Paramount’s contracts are typically one-offs, with its biggest customer being Rawlings’ Acony label. But he’s in talks with major labels about bringing some huge titles to Paramount (Salstrom, in his former job, has pressed Beatles and other big names) and he sees a bright future in the company’s quick turnarounds, which still manage to prize the artisanal approach.

“It’s all about finding the right angles and lighting,” said Adam Depre, Paramount’s head of quality control. “Sometimes we look for imperfections under these fluorescent lights we have, but the huge amount of natural light we get here is actually a good thing.”

Like the rest of Paramount’s business, it’s a mix of art and science — using Mountain Dew-colored chemical baths, for example, to electroplate lacquers, but also in the subjective way the human ear listens for tiny imperfections on the company’s test-turntables.

Paramount can press records in an array of gorgeous, candy-colored vinyl of either solid or spotted colors. Before that, however, a given recording must be mastered — or lathe-cut into a super-flat metal plate that’s then electroplated with silver and nickel (a.k.a. the lacquer) in a greenish-yellow stew, and later used to stamp copies by squashing chunks of melted vinyl (pucks, as they call them) into LPs, paper label and all.

Each stamping machine in the factory costs about $180,000, with four of them having been shipped from Sweden to Colorado. They’re named after employees’ pets, whose photos adorn their metal sides — including Salstrom’s cat Hobbs. Stacks of test pressings and yet-to-be-packaged records line a cinderblock wall beside them, which is painted top-to-bottom with a black-and-white mural.

By the time a record is shrink-wrapped and shipped to customers, it costs Paramount roughly $6.50 to make. That will be multiplied five to six times before it goes on sale to retail customers. But according to Rawlings, better-sounding records with higher price points sell far more copies on his website (and from his retail partners) than standard-issue releases that go as wide and cheap as possible, or that cull from multiple, separate manufacturing sources (see Taylor Swift LPs).

Rawlings is counting on that for the future of Paramount.

“The square footage and the piping is already here to expand,” Salstrom said as he showed off a pair of 250-horsepower boilers, which provide steam for the factory and help maintain a critical level of moisture for manufacturing against Denver’s high-and-dry climate.

“Having Gary do this from the ground up has allowed us to find all these efficiencies, which is how we’re able to spend less time doing it and lower the cost compared with other plants, while still having a quality that’s higher than what anyone else is doing anywhere,” Rawlings said.

Salstrom sees Paramount as an investment in the future of music in general. Vinyl wisdom skipped a generation as record sales cratered in the late 20th century, making way for cassettes, CDs and, eventually, streaming formats. There was no one left to teach this dying art, he worried, until interest began surging again in the 2000s.

Now he’s smiling.

“Any plant is only as good as the people working there,” Salstrom said. “There’s a real method to it. It’s not just mechanized. It’s the human factor.”