Inside ‘The Underground’: Iron Mountain in Butler County preserves audio, video, digital media for the future

When audio engineer Brett Zinn began working with the master tapes of “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, he noticed an unusual item on the track list.

“I was looking at it, when I was transferring, I’m like, ‘cup?’ What on earth is ‘cup?’ Why would I see that on a tape?” Zinn said. “Well, it’s somebody tapping a cup on a table.”

As Zinn maneuvered through the now-digitized musical stems — audio files created by breaking down a song into its individual components — he showcased the different features of the song, turning off the vocals or highlighting the underlying synthesizer and piano. Then he removed the slight percussion of the cup — and that absence became clearly evident.

“Your brain immediately tells you something’s not right,” Zinn said.

Whether it’s the music streaming on your phone, a TV commercial featuring a piece of a familiar tune, an instrumental version of a song in a video game’s background or an aging film reintroduced for the digital age, it’s quite possible a facility an hour north of Pittsburgh played a part in making that possible.

“If you listened to the radio on your way up here, you heard a version of that song that came up here through the vaults and was digitized in this room by one of these talented people,” said Bob Koszela, the global head of studio growth and innovation for Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services in Boyers, Butler County.

In another clip, Petty, who died in 2017, can be heard laughing after whistling near the end of the song.

Making sure those stems are indiscernible from the original recordings is just one of the responsibilities entrusted to Zinn and his co-workers with Iron Mountain.

Courtesy of Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services

The entrance to the Iron Mountain facility in Butler County.

‘The Underground’

Inside a former limestone mine in northern Butler County, Iron Mountain’s site serves as a secure storage facility, housing data centers, physical and digital media, documents and more.

The site was formerly owned by U.S. Steel and used to supply limestone to steel mills from 1902-1952. It sits 220 feet underground, offering protection from the elements and natural disasters. With more than 6 miles of roads and 1.8 million square feet of developed space, the facility is climate controlled, maintaining a temperature between 53 and 55 degrees with the help of a 100-acre underground lake.

Located off a winding country road, the facility utilizes multiple layers of security to protect its contents and clients, which number more than 2,300. (It also hosts its own fire brigade, noteworthy in light of the 2008 fire at Universal Studios in California that reportedly destroyed thousands of items in its archive.)

Privacy is a top concern. Anything seen on the golf cart ride into the facility, nicknamed “The Underground,” is considered off the record. Among the publicly known clients are the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which relocated its data center from Harrisburg. The Boyers facility is also home to memorabilia like flags, Purple Hearts, cards and messages left behind at the crash site of Flight 93 in Shanksville.

“Iron Mountain not only offers protective storage of our archive, but their Media and Archive Services team have helped us to digitize and preserve many historically significant assets over the years,” said Nick Allen, an archivist for Concord, an independent music company servicing more than 125,000 artists and songwriters.

The Media and Archive Services team — which numbers 350 people over seven digital studios at 22 facilities worldwide — puts its focus on preservation, storage and digitization of media, whether it’s audio, video or photos.

“In a lot of ways, we jokingly inside say we’re Iron Mountain’s best-kept secret,” said Koszela, a former Universal Music Group engineer who worked on Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” album, among others.

“And it’s by design, kind of,” added Meg Travis, Iron Mountain Media and Archive Service’s global head of marketing. “But we do want people to know what we’re doing and that it’s important.”

‘The past is the future’

With streaming music, video games and television clamoring for more content, that need has sent media companies looking into their archives.

“We like to say the past is the future of entertainment, of music, of video, because archiving is such a critical piece of the puzzle for creating current content,” Travis said.

“It’s easy to just assume there’s a lot of dusty old stuff stored in these rooms that is here for posterity sake,” Koszela added. “It’s so active. It’s so relevant.”

For Zinn, who cut his teeth in the analog world and made the transition to digital, his work is more than just a job.

“Music isn’t something that I do,” he said. “Music is all I do.”

In another demonstration, Zinn isolated the parts of Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” showcasing the guest vocals of Michael Jackson, who sings the chorus in the 1983 hit.

Reverse engineering a song can take eight to 10 hours for the team, which has to focus on more than just the reverb or bass.

“You have to understand the time frame that you’re listening to. You have to understand the history of how that came to be, meaning you have to understand the artist,” said audio engineer Carrie Weber. “You have to understand the producer. You have to understand the studio. You have to understand everybody that you can find in that chain of events that led to that mix that you’re hearing. You’re a historian. … So there’s a whole big bubble of things that you have to keep in mind.”

The media team utilizes a host of vintage equipment such as a Studer A827 24-track tape machine and Sony PCM-1630 audio processor (used to master audio CDs) to more esoteric devices that may have only been used for a few years in the 1980s.

“We have some digital tape machines back here which are kind of like hen’s teeth now,” said audio engineer Matt Steck, as he pointed to a Mitsubishi X-850, which he believed to be one of three or four still functioning in the world.

The wide variety of media formats often requires the Iron Mountain team to get creative in finding their own solutions, as the people who know how to service the older equipment have long since retired.

For the obscure equipment, Steck has found parts on eBay. When that fails, he has turned to a 3D printer to make gears and custom drive belts.

“It’s like you imagine someone in their 60s or 70s that used to work on this back in the day and knows it inside and out now,” Koszela said. “So it speaks to the nerdiness of Matt and his interest and passion in this stuff that he can dive in and work and get this stuff up and running.”

Rescuing old video

While there were a plethora of devices on hand for the audio department, Iron Mountain’s video team has even more, with its room filled from floor to ceiling with an array of screens and equipment.

“In video, every company had a different idea how to lay that down,” said video engineer Matt Patoray, “and that did finally shake out to a couple different formats.”

Tasked with rescuing old content from videotape — whether it was VHS or more obscure formats like Betacam SP, MiniDP or DVDPROPro — they sometimes have to bake the tapes in their tech shop because of “sticky shed syndrome.” That’s when the tape deteriorates and absorbs moisture, making it sticky.

They’ve also digitized footage, from interviews to award shows, of more than a thousand hours, spanning The Beatles to Taylor Swift, for the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.

With a “boneyard of machines” to pick from, Patoray and fellow video engineer Eric Rusnak do maintenance and in-house repair on the machines.

“We’re all engineers at heart in one form or another,” Patoray said. “We love the history, and we love preserving the history.”

Courtesy of Bethany Boarts/Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services

Historic photos

Beyond the audio and video, the original negatives of historic photographs are housed at Iron Mountain, including the Bettman Archive, which features “Lunch Atop A Skyscraper,” as well as Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue.

While they’ve moved away from flatbed scanners to overhead camera capture systems, they’ve also had to be resourceful for projects like prototypes of USA Today.

“The fun part with that was, obviously it was difficult to capture them flat because they’d been stored in halves,” said Bethany Boarts, a solutions architect. “So we actually built a vacuum table to flatten out the newspapers to capture them super flat.”

Turning into “mad scientists,” in Boarts’ words, the team used an air hockey table along with a 3D-printed valve fitted to a Shop-Vac to flatten the newspapers.

With all the content created and housed at Iron Mountain, digital storage is crucial, with two petabytes — that would be 2 million gigabytes — in-house and networked with other facilities.

“Metadata is critical,” Koszela said. “If somebody just writes Patsy Cline on a tape, we don’t know if it’s a video, we don’t know if it’s audio, we don’t know if it’s an interview or what it is.”

“One of our mottos is, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll if you can find it,” Travis said. “And it’s only rock ‘n’ roll if you can play it.”