STEVE STEPP: We go from the pancakes that you've seen before to the finished product that you see right here.

This is what our finished product looks like.

And so right now, we're watching duplicators running.

These are large reel reel duplicates.

They're running at 150 inches per second, which is 80 times the speed a cassette plays.

[music playing] Making its debut in 1963 at the Berlin radio show, the compact audio cassette would become an icon of the music industry in the 1980s.

The cassette tape was king until the compact disk or CD passed it in 1991.

One Ozarks business never lost faith in the audio cassette and now, the National Audio Company in downtown Springfield, Missouri is the United States' only producer of magnetic tape for audio cassettes.

On today's program, I'll get an in-depth tour of their facilities with Steve Stepp and Monte Chaney.

And they'll talk about the resurgence of the audio cassette.

[music playing] NARRATOR: Ozark's Public television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Welcome to Ozarks Video Magazine.

I'm Dale Moore, and I'm delighted that you're with us today.

We are on the road at National Audio Company in downtown Springfield, Missouri.

And I am joined by, and when I say an old friend, Steve Stepp and I have known each other for 50 years on the north side of 50 years or more.

Steve, good to see you.

Good to see you, Dale.

Good to see you.

I'm glad to be here at the home of National Audio company.

Good to have you here.

You know, I said here and kind of in the open that the older technologies are alive and well and never more true than here at National Audio Company, because you are the-- well, you're the kingpin in cassette manufacturing, cassette mastering.

And you've been doing that a long time.

Let's start at the very beginning, briefly, and talk to us about the very early beginnings of National Audio Company.

National Audio has been around since 1968.

My father and I started it together.

I was still in college at the time.

And we were loading broadcast tape cartridges and selling reel to reel audio tape at the time, and basically dealing with radio stations at the time and recording studios.

And over the years, we've seen new products come and go.

But the product that has come and stayed is the audio cassette.

DALE MOORE: Is the audio cassette.

And that's not where we started to begin with, but it's where we transitioned to.

And you made that reference, and I spent about 15 years in radio, so I took a lot of those old cartridges and degaussed them and recorded commercials on them and played.

And they probably-- the tape probably came from here.

It probably did.

We probably loaded those to begin with.

Yeah.

How has how has the cassette business remained so durable?

As you know, the audio cassette came in the 1960s.

It's one of the older formats that have been continuously around.

Came in the 1960s.

It was very strong in the 1970s and '80s.

The audio cassette basically owned the music world and the commercial music business.

And then when the CD came around, that looked like doom and gloom because the audio cassette lost its hold on the commercial music business to the CD.

We stayed in the business, making books and magazines on tape and working for libraries for the blind and handicapped, doing that type material, not doing music duplication or music production at that time.

And then an amazing thing happened.

And I'm making this pretty short.

About 2006, we started having independent bands and record labels come to us and say, can you put our music out on audio cassettes?

It takes too long with vinyl and it takes too much money to burn the old masters for the CDs.

And we started doing small orders, 50, 100, 200 pieces for independent bands and record labels.

And the first notice we got from major record labels was, it was Pearl Jam.

It was turning out a fan box, and it was going to have an audio cassette, a CD, a vinyl record and a scrapbook in it.

And they ordered 15,000 copies just to see if it would really sell.

Turned out the 15,000 copies were already sold before they got to their distribution warehouse.

And then Smashing Pumpkins came along and tried the same thing, again 15,000 copies.

Also when they got to the distribution warehouse, the major record labels were sold again.

And all at one time, we're back in the music business with audio cassettes.

And that has not stopped since that time.

The durability of the industry is remarkable because you think of the old 8-track tapes and they're kind of a joke now, oh, I had an 8 or 4-track tape.

That's right.

But here you are with an industry that has remained relevant in the face of some pretty extraordinary-- You've got some competition with digital and other kinds of mediums.

That's right.

It's been amazing to us actually, it's every day here is a new day.

As we say, it's a lot of fun.

If it wasn't a lot of fun, it would be too much work.

But one of the things that's happened is over the course of time, with streaming and things coming along, the CD has gradually lost its hold on the commercial music business.

Now we're back to people who want media again and that turns out to be audio cassettes and vinyl records.

And with the COVID pandemic that's gone on and all the other things that have happened, actually last year, both audio cassettes and vinyl records outsold the CD in the commercial music industry.

So it's a big turnaround.

Yeah, you've got a huge operation here and we're going to take a tour of it in just a second.

So I know that we're on the first floor area here.

And I've just walked in the front door.

What do I see when I walk in the front door of National Audio?

What happens.

When you walk in the front door, you'll see the people sitting around listening to people on the phone.

We don't just have voicemail.

We talk to all of our customers.

That's a rule here.

It's old technology.

DALE MOORE: I like that.

You will also see the graphics department on the ground floor.

This is where we take the artwork that our customers send to us and we set it up and print the J cards of the cover art that go in the cassette boxes.

We set up the imprinting that goes on the cassette itself or the label, if they want a paper label.

And we set that all up and have the customers approve PDFs of that before we do any printing.

That's on the ground floor.

You also see audio mastering on the ground floor.

And we are in one of the audio mastering suites right here.

This is where we take the reels of tape, the cassettes, the CDs, the vinyl records, the WAV files, the AIFF files, whatever the customer has and we build a duplication master that we will use to duplicate their product with.

DALE MOORE: OK, well for example, let's-- listen, if you think that can't get quality sound from a cassette, just listen to this.

All right.

Deal.

What are you going to play for us here?

We're going to play the part of the theme from "The Force Awakens."

And this was a soundtrack that we did for Disney recently.

DALE MOORE: OK. [theme music] Well, Steve, that's got me all excited to see how this process works all the way start to finish.

Let's go take a look.

STEVE STEPP: All right.

[machines whirring] DALE MOORE: Well, Monte, it's awful good to see you.

Good to see you, Dale.

It's been a few years.

It's been a few years, my friend, but always, always good to have our paths to cross once again.

That's right.

So Steve was starting the process and telling me kind of where things go and how they start and how they get there.

And we heard some pretty good music that was on a cassette tape earlier.

All right.

And what I want to know is, how to-- I mean, literally, we can start back when it's in liquid form.

We'll start back in powder form.

Let's start in powder form.

Let's go step on.

All right.

We start out with the basic powders, the oxides and various things that we add to the tape to keep it squeaking and being electrostatic.

And we bring all that together in our mix room.

And it comes in there dry.

And then we make a very fine high quality polyurethane varnish, we use poly and dissolve it up.

And we add the dry goods to it.

And we have 225 horsepower dissolvers back there that we actually reduce it into a mix with.

And then we run through the mills, we've got 225 horsepower mills.

So we use cubic zirconium to grind it up to get it fine enough to make the all the oxides and everything blend together to the tape.

Once that blending is all done, which takes hours, then we will add it into the pressure pots and it comes from there, out of here and goes up to the other end the line to be coated on to the bare rolls of film.

So in an average day, how big a pot will you cook up?

One.

One?

It takes about 18 hours, 17 hours worth of work to get one pot going.

Where do you get those products from?

All over the world actually.

Some of the fatty acids that we use come from the Malaysia and Indonesia.

The oxides come from a special range up in the Mesabi Range, and are prepared for us by an intermediary supplier.

They actually kill dry it and grind it up to a fine point.

And then we further grind it here when we get it from the shop.

And then we have some of the oxides that are basically cobalt doped that come from Korea.

Because they're mined out of some kind of a mining process?

They actually come out of individual deposits have been placed meteorically into the Earth in the past and then they find that-- they find these deposits and the mine them and treat them, drying them up, and then they kill dry them.

And there's actually-- there's physics going on, there's chemistry going on.

Magnetic engineering.

Magnetic engineering.

Electrical engineering as well.

Yeah.

So it brings together all of it.

All of it all together right here in one place.

OK, so we're in the line room here that actually takes it from-- I guess the slurry.

The slurry in the pressure pot comes right up and around the corner and goes right back to that, right up behind that line over there.

And at the end of the line, walk us through-- let's just talk about what happens on this line.

When it gets to the other end, it goes into the clear film and the oxide all meet in one place.

We have a slot dicoder.

The liquid that comes in the pressure pot comes up, distributed across the film.

We level it with two glass bars to make sure it's level and square, and then it goes through a pair of what we call orientation magnets.

These are 9,000 gauss magnets, polarized north pole to north pole.

And all the molecules sitting there, they all fight with each other and they run up in straight lines, rather than just be criss cross.

That helps the high frequency response.

And from there, when it crosses that line, there's one roller there, is a safety roller, so that if a line breaks or anything, it doesn't get down.

It goes through 48 foot of drying ovens, and it's held up in an air suspension in there, does not touch anything until it gets down to this far end of the line.

When it gets down to the far end of the line, we have a steering unit over there on the line, that makes sure it's square with the world.

Then we have a little device that has a sample of Krypton 85 and it's about the size of a point on a pin.

And we have a syncolator above that.

And by the amount of attenuation we get from that film we can tell how thick the coating is.

And it comes down, goes over TV camera monitors there, shows where-- if we've got any leaks in it and any holes appear.

And then winds up and that's the film is actually coated at that point in time.

DALE MOORE: So start to finish, the end of this end, how long does it take to get a spool?

Oh, how long, it about split 40, about 47 to 50 minutes.

It depends on-- if we have issues with barometric pressure and temperature outside, air temperatures, how hot we have to heat the air up to be able to dry it and get it out of here.

And then one of the other things that we have here back in the corner is this, you'll see there's some UV lights and that causes our effluent that comes off of the film to decompose into water and carbon dioxide.

So we're in a-- and the building is an old, old building.

And then for to be able to control the environment like that is pretty remarkable.

Yeah, we have a lot of HVAC in here.

And we and we keep the moisture and the temperature very well controlled.

DALE MOORE: Well, it's hard to imagine that these big rolls that I'm looking at behind me here wind up on a cassette, but I'd sure like to see how this winds up.

MONTE CHANEY: All right, if we get out here and it takes up on the bottom over there, we give it a little time, we carry it around and then we go to the calendaring process.

Let's go take a look.

All right?

All right.

I'm curious.

That's a lot of tape to get-- we didn't-- to get that wide, right?

DALE MOORE: So Monte, I noticed in another room that there was a machine, I think it was called, was it a colander?

Calendar.

A calendar.

Calendar.

What does that do?

MONTE CHANEY: It actually, whenever we get done coding the tape, we actually heat it back up to about 156 degrees and we squeeze it between stainless steel rolls and two compliant rolls, two different times, at 10,000 PSI.

And it puts a shine on the back side of the tape.

And on the front side, the oxide side, it levels out the surface, so it makes the high frequency response better and makes the tape look really nice.

So it's of a finishing process.

It is.

But we're not finished yet by any means.

It's what puts that shine on there.

Put that shine on that tape.

OK. OK. All right.

And what I have been struck by so far is that we're about halfway through.

And what I've already had, I've had a lesson in meteorology, in physics and chemistry, in electronics and-- Magnetic engineering.

Magnetic engineering.

I'm watching the sky and aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and all of that, a fascinating process.

It is.

There's a lot of things involved here and it all comes together in one place.

Yeah, and we're not done, as they say, and but there's more, wait, There's more.

So where are we at now?

I know there are two lines here.

What are we talking about?

MONTE CHANEY: These are the slitters We make the tape in the 6 and 1/2 inch width, and this is where it gets cut down into the cassette width.

And we start out with the roll down here.

We have a light on to inspect it as it comes around, and it goes through this cutting head which is here.

And it cuts it up into 42 pieces of film.

And the two edge pieces are waste, but the 40 in the middle are 3.81 millimeters wide, which is the width of a cassette tape.

And we wind them into pancakes, and there's about 10,000-- we try to get 10,000 foot on each pancake.

And sometimes you have one or two break, but that's the way it is.

And that's how it comes out and it's ready to go.

DALE MOORE: And I think you said, you trim off on both sides, you trim off some waste.

MONTE CHANEY: We trim off about a 1/4 inch waste off of each side, the 6 and 1/2, and it goes down the vacuum and into a bag.

You know, what I've noticed about all of this equipment, none of this was manufactured last week.

This is old gear.

It's all old gear.

Is this-- how hard is it to keep this equipment?

It's a m something going on somewhere all the time, walking around with a grease gun in one hand and voltmeter in the other.

You never know.

And you can't just run to the hardware store and buy a part.

No we have-- we have a good machine shop here in town that does most of our manufacturing work for us.

We have a little shop up on third floor, you'll see.

What is the vintage age of something like this?

Most of this, these are in the '70s and early '80s, the baseline in there is some of that dates back and some of the test equipment I have in the lab in there dates back to the late '60s.

Yeah, and you know and I've been struck by the employees here, your team that this is-- you don't see.

I mean how do you train for this?

I mean-- It's one on one.

It's one on one.

You can write books.

You can write books.

But you can't demonstrate where you got to hold that finger just exactly to get those things.

I can imagine this get real exciting in here if one of these broke lose.

It does.

Well, this is our-- We call this the analog world.

And digital is easy.

Analog is hard.

Analog is hard.

All right.

So that's been our challenge.

Monte, always good to see you, my friend.

Pleased to see you.

Great seeing you here.

Take care of yourself.

Well I will.

You too.

Steve is waiting for me upstairs.

I'm going to run upstairs.

You run right up there-- And see what the boss man.

See what the magic up there goes.

Thank you.

DALE MOORE: Hey, Steve.

Dale.

Good to see you again, my friend.

That's right.

Well, I'll tell you what, this room I notice is a big room.

It's a big room, busy stuff.

And there's a lot of stuff going on in here.

I know when we started, you said that you all literally go from the beginning of an order all the way out to the end of the order.

Yes, we do.

And a lot of that ordering process gets fulfilled in this room.

This is the end of the road.

Let's talk about what happens in here.

Well, the blank raw tape comes up on the tape manufacturing floor.

It's duplicated here, it's loaded, as you see going on the machines behind us here, and then that's all packaged in the box with the J cards and the cover art and wrapped up for retail sale on the shelf.

So we can look at all the different parts going on here and talk about that as we go, if you'd like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the actual loading of the cassette, I see the pancake, so that's come up from downstairs.

How fast do these machines work?

How many of these machines do you have?

This is busy.

STEVE STEPP: This is busy, that's right.

These machines behind you are loading at 1,500 inches per second.

A tape plays-- DALE MOORE: 1,500 inches per second.

STEVE STEPP: A cassette tape plays at 1 and 7/8 inches a second, that's how much tape goes past the play heads.

In a second, these loading machines load 1,500 inches.

So a 90 minute tape takes us just under 7 seconds to load it.

They're moving on.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, they are.

STEVE STEPP: And as you see, generally each person runs at least three machines and we've got quite a line of loaders here.

We've got more in storage.

We actually have about 100 more loaders in storage so we're not worried about outrunning the capacity of our equipment.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, and so in a typical day, if there is such a thing in the business, about how many cassettes will you manufacture or load?

STEVE STEPP: It all depends on the length of the cassettes.

But if we go with the 60 minute cassette, what most people call the T60, running at full capacity and eight hours, we can do about 100,000.

DALE MOORE: OK. How does the music get on these cassettes?

We're going to go look at the duplication line.

You got a minute?

I'd love to look at the duplication line.

All right.

Let's walk over there.

All right.

All right.

Well, Steve, I feel like we're making progress in a big way here.

We've gone from the pancakes and we're looking at one right now being duplicated.

This floor that we're on, there's a lot of moving parts up here.

Walk me around this room.

What's going on up here?

Well, this is the finishing room for everything.

We do the duplication, the imprinting, the labeling, the boxing, and the loading of the cassette all on this floor.

We go from the pancakes that you've seen before to the finished product that you see right here.

This is what our finished product looks like.

And so right now we're watching duplicators running.

These are large reel to reel duplicators.

They're running at 150 inches per second, which is 80 times the speed a cassette plays.

Quality is much better, almost no wound clutter.

Frequency response is excellent at that speed so very, very high quality duplication.

The tapes will be duplicated here.

They'll be taken up to the loading machines where they're actually loaded into the cassette cartridges.

Cartridges will have already been imprinted with ultraviolet ink or labeled with paper labels and then those will go from there into the boxing process where they're put in the box with the J card or the cover art and then overwrapped by the overwrapper.

And the overwrapper is a story on its own.

It's a 1938 cigarette wrapper that we had modified to wrap audio cassettes.

DALE MOORE: How did you come up with that idea?

STEVE STEPP: It was a matter of looking at an audio cassette box and saying, how can we wrap this thing faster?

Everybody else had always shrink wrapped it, right.

You end up with a burn seam, it looks ugly.

And we looked at that and we said what else is that size?

And somebody said a package of cigarettes.

Cassette is a little thinner this way, but we were able to modify it, move the rails and get that machine to do it.

And it works at the same speed as everything else on this floor.

Once we hit packaging, one cassette per second.

That's what it is, whether we're imprinting or boxing or wrapping, it's the same speed.

And if you wanted it faster, you couldn't go any faster, so that's kind of-- We haven't found a way to go any faster yet, no.

No, these machines right here are duplicating as fast as any tape machines on Earth have ever duplicated.

And I know these-- DALE MOORE: I know this is fast, but over on where you're actually loading it into cassettes, is that faster?

STEVE STEPP: 10 times as fast.

DALE MOORE: 10 times as fast.

STEVE STEPP: We're running 150 inches per second on these duplicators.

We run it 1,500 inches per second on the loaders.

So we're talking about loading a 90 minute tape in about 7 seconds.

DALE MOORE: And you literally do everything.

I mean this starts off as powder and you wind up with that.

But you even get it to the end user.

You mail for some of your clients.

Yes, we do.

Not for the record labels, we drop the cassettes directly to the distribution warehouses for them.

But for the magazines on tape and things of that type we do direct mailing directly to the end users.

Wow.

This is a fascinating operation.

And to think that the technology here that you have and that you're using is-- I don't want this to sound bad, but it's old technology.

STEVE STEPP: 1960s and 1970s, that's pretty old.

DALE MOORE: And it's still in pretty high demand.

STEVE STEPP: It certainly is.

It's growing at the rate of about 20% a year.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, that's fascinating.

Well I know that, as they say, but wait, there's more.

But wait, there is more.

Because you've got a part of this company that is really, I think, the most fascinating part of it maybe, and that's the archive process.

That's right.

I'd love to go take a look at the archives.

We'll do that.

We never get rid of a master recording.

We never get rid of the graphic art for a program.

And if 20 years later, a record label wants to reissue a record, we can do that.

Let's go take a look.

Let's go.

All right.

Let's go see it.

Thank you.

Well, Steve, as they say in the movies, we're at the end of the trail.

We are at the top of the building now and I've been looking forward to this part of the tour because I've heard about the archives.

I've seen little video clips of that.

And at the very top of this grand old building we're standing in we're, in the archives.

Before we talk really specifically about what is on this floor, give us just a real quick thumbnail view of what this old building, what's the story of this old girl?

STEVE STEPP: We have a five-story building and next to it we have a nine-story building.

We're in the top floor of a five-story building right now.

This building was finished in 1882.

It was at that time to be a farm implement factory and they built rakes and heralds and plows and things of that type here.

It was that until about 1895, it became a queensware manufacturing plant.

That was heavy ceramic dishes and things of that type.

And then about 1900, the McGregor Hardware Company bought this building and moved down here from St. Louis Street.

This became their main headquarters and warehouse.

And they were distributing all the Browning firearms west of the Mississippi through this building.

Later, they moved out on East Division and built a smaller building and Rodgers and Baldwin bought the building and they operated their hardware company here for many years.

Following that, it became the automotive belt factory for DACO Rubber Company until they built their new factory southwest of here.

And then after that still, it was the RedHead Outdoor Wear Division Warehouse for Bass Pro until they built the new Sportsman's Park.

So it's always been right at the center of economic activity in Springfield.

In fact, this is the first city chartered industrial park in Springfield.

And it was done with bonds like we do it now.

And in 1876, I believe, when the railroad came through this part of town, they actually set up an industrial park down here and this was one of the first industrial locations built here.

This has been a heck of a journey.

We've started at the very beginning with literally a bucket of powder and we've gone from there to now where it's archived.

What is in this room?

Tell me about this room.

In this room is a box for every tape release we have ever made.

And this goes back to the 1970s.

In that box, there is an original tape that we can compare with anything that anybody has out in the field, we can compare it to the original master.

There's also the graphics for that project.

It's security for us that we've got that, and it is also security for our customers, because if you're one of our customers and you want to re-release something you did 20 years ago, call us and say, I need 5,000 copies of this, we'll come up here and grab this box.

We'll start the duplication again with the original master.

We'll start printing the graphics for the artwork.

And you can have identical copies to what we did 20 years ago.

DALE MOORE: What are you holding there now?

This is a copy of the awesome mix, volume one from the first Guardians of the Galaxy.

DALE MOORE: Disney.

STEVE STEPP: It was Disney.

And it was the first billion seller on cassette since 1994.

DALE MOORE: Wow.

STEVE STEPP: We're very proud of that.

That's kind of a feather in our caps.

DALE MOORE: It truly is.

What-- so what is-- we've got about a minute left here.

What is the future for this company?

You talk about the Energizer Bunny, you're still going well.

The future for this company looks very bright at this point in time.

We have, as you have seen in walking through the building today, a lot of very experienced supervisory personnel and a very young workforce.

We have a lot of young people learning how to make these and that's important.

Secondly, the audio cassette is back.

The audio cassette, like vinyl, is now outselling all other formats in the commercial music industry.

So that's good.

It's continuing to grow at a rapid rate.

We're making three tapes now instead of one.

A couple of years ago, we only made one tape, now we make three different ones.

So we're expanding our line.

And I think it's very bright it's counter to common sense.

There's no question, it is counter to common sense.

But it's different every day and it's exciting.

Steve, thank you very much for your friendship.

Thank you, Sir.

Thanks for the tour of this wonderful facility, National Audio Company.

And I want to come back and do it again.

You're welcome any time.

And thank you.

You stay tuned.

I'll be right back.

DALE MOORE: Ozarks Public television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I hope you've enjoyed the tour around National Audio Company.

And the next time you listen to some of your favorite music it just may be on a cassette tape manufactured there.

A big thanks to Steve Stepp and Monte Chaney for showing us around, and you join me again soon for another episode of Ozarks Watch Video Magazine.

[music playing]