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GARNER PRODUCTS INC.
QUALITY IS IMPORTANT - WE LOVE OUR PRODUCTS, BUT WE NEVER WANT TO SEE THEM AGAIN.
Garner Products designs, manufactures, and sells equipment that delivers complete, permanent, and verifiable data elimination. Their products
ensure your data is unrecoverable. Founded more than 60 years ago, they serve customers from every industry in 120 countries around the world. Today Garner products are used by data centers, governments, hospitals, and offices who want to secure their data. Garner provides time-tested solutions for permanent data security of working and nonworking hard drives, magnetic tape, and solid-state media. From design and engineering to production and worldwide shipping, everything is produced at their Roseville , Ca. headquarters.
The company started out in 1959 as a recording studio by Bob Stofan called Audiolab Electronics, Inc. Bob’s son Ron and Ron’s wife Michelle own and manage the company now. Their son Justin manages the machine shop.
Bob’s love of radio started early, listening to WW2 on his short-wave radio from his childhood home in New Jersey. He later joined the Airforce setting up radio stations and radio communications during the Korean War. “Dad was proud of what he was doing during Korea,” chuckles Ron Stofan, president and CEO of Garner Products Inc. “He was especially proud that the importance of his job meant he got his own Jeep. As an enlisted man that was a big deal.” Bob was a sound engineer at Sacramento’s channel 10 TV station before becoming chief engineer for KRAK Hercules broadcasting company. Media companies needed to have an easy and effective way to erase the cue tone on broadcast tape cartridges “carts”, so he began manufacturing degaussing machines.
A broadcast cart is a continuous loop of tape wound inside a cartridge with a “beep” recorded on a separate track indicating the beginning of the recording. That beep is a cue tone. When the machine recognizes the beep, it stops, and it is at the beginning of the recording cycle. The DJ hits play and “Go See Cal” commercial would come on all queued up. Before new content could be recorded you needed to get rid of the cue tone. The only way to do that is by demagnetizing the tape in a processed called degaussing. “Degaussing leaves the magnetic field in a random state with no readable data,” explains Ron. “We manufactured and sold degaussing machines to the broadcast companies. Video followed radio, diskettes came along and so forth. It was similar technology, but harder to erase the data because the tape was larger with a higher coercivity, requiring a stronger magnetic field to remove the recordings. Basically, in a perfect world If the coercivity is 500 you need to have gauss strength larger than 501 to overcome it.”
Current technology degausser alongside the original TB-1B circa late 50s.
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CNC WEST December 2021/January 2022