Missouri Life September 2023

MADE IN MO

ost people would have declared the audio cassette industry dead for decades, but the format has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. For National Audio Company, cassettes never went away. One of only three big cassette manufacturers left on the planet, the Springfield-based company, which began in 1968, can produce upward of 100,000 tapes a week. “We make enough tape every month and a half to go to the moon and back,” says NAC Vice-President Phil Stepp. In a world dominated by digital music, why exactly are so many people returning to an older music format? Phil explains that with digital music, “You’re getting one frequency every millisecond. With tape or vinyl, you can get an infinite number of frequencies each millisecond. You get harmonics that way. That’s why people say analog recordings sound better, more real, than a digital recording.” Steve Stepp, founder of NAC, describes himself as “an unrepentant tape guy.” He has been working with cassettes for more than 50 years. “It’s the best format invented as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “It’s very dura ble, almost bulletproof. You can’t say that for a CD or vinyl record. Digital music is so over-processed. That’s one of the reasons people are going back to vinyl and tape.” Even during the CD’s domination of the music industry in the ’90s, NAC remained busy with cassettes, crafting them for indie bands, religious organizations, books-on-tape projects, and court systems. Every aspect of the cassette-making process at NAC is done from scratch, from the tape to shell to packaging and artwork, within the company’s five-story building in downtown Springfield. NAC’s willingness to stick faithfully to the cassette format has paid big dividends. After everyone jumped ship to CDs, most companies and record labels like Sony, Disney, and Universal either scrapped, stored, or sold off their cassette-making equip ment for whatever they could get. Their loss was NAC’s gain. Now, these companies pay NAC to manufacture Rewind the Tape A Springfield company keeps cassettes playing. STORY & PHOTOS Paul Cecchini M

cassettes for them—often on the same machines they originally sold to NAC. Much of the machinery is from the 1960s and is no longer manufactured. Thankfully, if any need repairs, NAC has stockpiled enough spare parts to keep the machines running for decades. The tape is manufactured and varnished via an iron oxide mixture, which is coated onto a base film and sent

through 48 feet of ovens. Temperatures are monitored and adjusted daily to account for atmospheric conditions such as temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, which can have an adverse effect on the tape. The tape is polished, allowing it to have better contact with a tape player’s recording or playback head, then slit into multiple strands and loaded into cassette shells. Finally, the cassettes are checked for quality, encased, wrapped, packed, and sent to shipping via conveyor belt. “There’s a thousand ways it can go wrong,” Steve says. “There’s only one way it can go right, and that’s what we have to do every day. There is a very small margin of error in everything we do.” As the cassette industry continues to thrive, so does National Audio Company—even more than the media might report. “One of the Nielsen ratings reports said there were 20,000 cassettes per year made for the music business. The day that came out, we had just shipped 60,000,” Steve says with a grin.

From top, rolls of slit tape are ready for insertion into cassette shells. National Audio Company employee Barb Jilek checks a pack of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 soundtrack tapes for quality. The vintage machinery required to make cassettes is kept in tip-top shape. NAC operates out of a five-story building in downtown Springfield.

16 / MISSOURILIFE.COM