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Miscellaneous News

1.  For 15 years, Kelly Pribble, working for Iron Mountain, has been at the forefront of an obscure but vital industrywide effort to save old tapes — for which he employs an assortment of handmade tools and Rube Goldberg-worthy machines in a cramped workshop. 

Some of the most jeopardized recordings are from the 1970s and ’80s, after manufacturing changes introduced problems that became evident only with time. Unless the tapes are properly preserved, their slow decay will threaten the survival of original recordings from vast swaths of music history.

“It’s a race against time,” Pribble said.

 In 2011, the company sent Pribble to examine problems among a cache of thousands of audiotapes in Brazil. Many had been affected by mold, a common hazard plaguing tapes not held in a climate-controlled environment.

Another routine problem among tapes of 1970s and ’80s vintage is “sticky shed syndrome.” Also known as hydrolysis, it is a deterioration in the material that holds together a tape’s oxide — the magnetic compound that contains its audio information — resulting in a residue that can destroy the tape if it is played. The fix, long established, involves “baking” tapes in an oven to release trapped moisture.

But what Pribble saw in Brazil, he said, was far worse. More than a thousand tapes were bound together so tightly on their reels that they seemed like a solid mass. With others, an oily lubricant had leached to the surface.

He experimented with solutions and built prototypes to repair the tapes, a process that took three years.

His unbinding process involves soaking tapes in a solution of deionized water — he declined to specify the formula, calling it a trade secret — for as long as a month. He then places the tapes in a tub with an ultrasonic cleaner, which sends an army of tiny bubbles to penetrate between the tape’s layers.

Pribble was sent about 350 tapes of live recordings from Springsteen’s archive. More than 100 exhibited what Pribble calls “loss of lubricant syndrome,” in which a gooey, beige material collects on the tape head when played, distorting the audio and possibly damaging the equipment.

His weapon to attack this problem is a humble roll of pellon — the white adhesive used in waxing salons — which he affixes to a paintbrush-size handle made from PVC plumbing pipes. He removes the excess lubricant by rotating the pellon back and forth against the tape as it rolls through a decommissioned deck, one song at a time. Its clean state may last only 30 days — long enough to transfer its contents to another format, usually digital.

Another engineer spent 100 hours cleaning mold off of tapes with lighter fluid.

New York Times, December 1, 2025

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