Vinyl may have been the first vintage audio medium to make a comeback, but there’s another analog industry on the same track: cassette tapes. National Audio Company, based in Springfield, Missouri, is the nation’s largest remaining cassette maker. With such projects as Metallica’s remastered 1982 demo and Kurt Cobain’s home recordings, business is better than ever. We asked president Steve Stepp how NAC has survived.
As of September, NAC had produced 31 percent more music tapes in 2015 than you did the previous year. Why have cassettes once again become popular? Part of it is that analog is just better than digital sound. Performers have realized this, and so have the major record labels, who have gone back to recording their masters on analog, which has more warmth and presence.
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Was there ever a point when you thought that your business would fail? We all have those thoughts in the middle of the night, but I never had them. At no point in time did we ever consider getting out. The only thing that did hurt us was the economy collapse.
What did you do to survive? We sold CDs and did a lot of spoken-word releases, and we bought up all the equipment we could. It wasn’t a gamble, because we knew we could use it in production or for remaining parts. We saw it as an investment in the future.
So you knew cassettes would make a comeback. I won’t take credit for being smart enough to have foreseen this, but we knew there is a strong market for audiotape. They’re the most inexpensive to make and the most durable—and they just sound better.
Do you think it will just be another passing trend? I don’t think it’s a flash-in-the-pan sort of thing. Walkmen are coming back up, and as demand grows, you may start seeing the combo decks back in cars. At least, that’s what we’re hoping for.
Why have you stayed in business this long? It’s because of stubbornness and stupidity; I was too stubborn to quit and too stupid to know that there was no market. I’m like a cartoon character who runs off a cliff but doesn’t fall.
