Otari MX-5050 Review (Reel to Reel Tape Deck)

[Everett T]

I transferred all the DAT tapes and masters I had to hard disk probably 20 years ago, so at this point DAT is a distant memory. I dealt a lot with the Tascam DA-88 8 track digital recorder which used Hi-8 tapes in film post production sound. It was more reliable, at least at the time.

I know people that still record with Hi8 lol. We did BetaMax in-between cassette and DAT for field recording, PIA.

 

[Dial]

I had a Sony portable DAT too (which never worked properly but that's not what the after-sales manager said when I brought it back to the store - who sent it back to the direct supplier) and when the warranty has finished its service, it has done the same. I then used a portable cassette recorder from Panasonic which lasted 1 year at most. Disgusted, I then also sold my Uher stereo report and my JVC and Akaï cassette decks. The tapeheads were the problem : when used you must change them, realign if you found any...

 

[Michel Forbes]

I had two Sony DAT machines, one portable, which died years ago. They were both serviced at least once at some point, but eventually too many problems doomed them. DAT was a too-tweaky format to hold reliability in the very long term. DAT was heavily used in the motion picture sound industry I worked in, and all of them failed eventually.

A DAT is a VCR , so tiny mechanism and rotary head.

 

[Doodski]

A DAT is a VCR , so tiny mechanism and rotary head.

The Sony portable and home audio DAT's that I serviced in and out of warranty where excellent although very tweaky to service and required access to service manual literature in the form of service bulletins and such. Without factory service manual and literature access a tech would have been screwed for information. I feel for anybody without factory service department connections servicing one.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

A DAT is a VCR , so tiny mechanism and rotary head.

The problem with formats like DAT is that the mechanism is so small and intricate that long term reliability suffers. The makers of the transports could make them very reliable and stable, but that would increase the cost too much for commercial use. Instead we get belts, plastic gears, cams and other widgets crammed into a space that only a watchmaker could love.

 

[Doodski]

The problem with formats like DAT is that the mechanism is so small and intricate that long term reliability suffers. The makers of the transports could make them very reliable and stable, but that would increase the cost too much for commercial use. Instead we get belts, plastic gears, cams and other widgets crammed into a space that only a watchmaker could love.

That's pretty much it.

 

[Dial]

Yes, glad to be rid of all those gadgets with modern hitech recorders. I checked my vcr and it still works (I don't need the recording function anymore though).

 

[Siwel]

As far as availability of the old tape formulations, that is not true. All of them are still available and the quality is as good as or better than the original. Also, sticky shed syndrome no longer exists. You are correct though about expense - they cost a lot.

ATR Tape - Same as old Ampex 456
Recording The Masters - Same as the older European formulations.
Capture Recording Tape - A good tape aimed at consumers.

And yes, nothing looks as cool as reel to reel tape machines.

View attachment 174554

Reviving an old thread I got around to looking at again. Fun racks there, and very entertaining juxtaposition of technology. Curiously, I have a TC158SD in my system too. My wife found it at a garage sale for 10 bucks and scooped it up to play her old demos. It's a curiosity in my rack now but I have it connected in case somebody actually wants to play a cassette. That never seems to happen though.

.

 

[milosz]

I have a Nakamichi MR-1 connected to my PC via a Focusrite 2i2, so I can digitize various aircheck tapes from my days on a community radio station and also to digitize various other cassettes.

I had an NAD 6300 3-head machine in my listening room, which actually sounded better, but I sold that and kept the Nakamichi because the Nakamichi has balanced XLR outputs. I had not listened to a cassette in years. I still have a bunch of tapes from the "Small Press" indie / art / experimental era of cassette tape distribution. Alfonia Tims and his Flying Tigers "Future Funk / Uncut," Black Iron Prison "Nothing Exists," Rising From the Red Sand compilation, etc etc. Those were the days.....

 

[Mr. Widget]

Conclusions
I sort of assumed SINAD would land in 40s and it did. I didn't expect the rest of the garbage this deck produces, nor the one bad channel. Need to find the time to tear it open and see what could be done to improve it. I have not listened to it in months. When I did, my favorite second generation master tape from rock music of 1970s is superb. It easily outperforms the digital ones which have been remastered to death. It is eye and ear popping how much nicer they sound than digital. I often play that tape when people come over first and their jaw drops on the floor in how good it sounds. Tape hiss is there during gaps between tracks and the highs sound a bit distorted to me but neither takes away from enjoyment of that tape. It makes me grin thinking about it as I type this!

Tape gives me the experience of the analog recording without loudness wars and remastering without the limitations and aggravation of LP. I also find the format so much more gorgeous to look at as it plays than anything out there, digital or analog. It is a shame that its popularity has pushed the price of used decks so high.

Anyway, we have first super hard set of measurements of any tape deck now. Gives us some anchoring as far as objective results are concerned.

I recently got my Otari MX5050 back from servicing by one of the last Bay Area tape gurus. I bought the deck over a decade ago when my old Pioneer 1020L needed service and I realized I could sell a broken Pioneer for more than an excellent condition Otari was going for. Silly audiophiles.

Unfortunately what I didn't know was that if you put the deck in storage and don't use it, the grease will turn to glue and require service. Oh well, now that it is back to tip top shape as long as I run the beast every week or two it will likely outlive me. I also dropped off a box of NOS tape I had and the tech set up my machine for the tape I use which is always important, especially if you are going to record anything on it.

When I last used the deck my stereo was quite decent but it wasn't as silent with such a high SN ratio as my current system... these machines are noisy! On top of that the motors and internal fan(s) are audible. Oh well, it is fun to hear some of the old studio recordings I made as a student and hear the noise floor increase with every punch in.

 

[amirm]

Unfortunately what I didn't know was that if you put the deck in storage and don't use it, the grease will turn to glue and require service.

Indeed. Use to repair a ton of turntables and decks due to this reason back in late 1970s/early 1980s. Makes no intuitive sense why this happens. But it did. Often it resembles grains of sugar! And sticky just the same. My Otari has a sticky capstan which I have to persuade with my finger to get going. Need to open and clean/lubricate it....

 

[Mulder]

Digitized second generation master tapes from a reel-to-reel tape recorder.... what a thing. Then one could really put credibility behind the slogan: digital that sounds analogue.

 

[AudioSceptic]

I recently got my Otari MX5050 back from servicing by one of the last Bay Area tape gurus. I bought the deck over a decade ago when my old Pioneer 1020L needed service and I realized I could sell a broken Pioneer for more than an excellent condition Otari was going for. Silly audiophiles.

Unfortunately what I didn't know was that if you put the deck in storage and don't use it, the grease will turn to glue and require service. Oh well, now that it is back to tip top shape as long as I run the beast every week or two it will likely outlive me. I also dropped off a box of NOS tape I had and the tech set up my machine for the tape I use which is always important, especially if you are going to record anything on it.

When I last used the deck my stereo was quite decent but it wasn't as silent with such a high SN ratio as my current system... these machines are noisy! On top of that the motors and internal fan(s) are audible. Oh well, it is fun to hear some of the old studio recordings I made as a student and hear the noise floor increase with every punch in.

How would a ReVox of that era compare with the Otari? In Europe at least, ReVox has always had the reputation as the reel-to-reel if you could afford one.

 

[Mr. Widget]

When I was in college working at the college radio station, we had Crown decks in our main rooms, Pioneer RT1050s for our small production rooms (closets), and a ReVox A77 that was a floater. It sounded fine, but didn't feel very solid. I always felt that I was handling a delicate instrument instead of a tool you could use day in and out and in fact it was frequently on the service bench.

Sound quality? It was 1/4 track only, the other decks were all 1/2 track. The Otari MX5050s are 1/2 track decks with a secondary 1/4 track playback head. With analog tape it is all about surface area. 15ips 1/2 track will give you better SN and HF extension, so the 7 1/2ips 1/4 track ReVox and Tandberg machines can't really compete.

That said, the pro decks from Studer (ReVox parent company) are arguably the best decks ever produced.

 

[dfuller]

When I was in college working at the college radio station, we had Crown decks in our main rooms, Pioneer RT1050s for our small production rooms (closets), and a ReVox A77 that was a floater. It sounded fine, but didn't feel very solid. I always felt that I was handling a delicate instrument instead of a tool you could use day in and out and in fact it was frequently on the service bench.

Sound quality? It was 1/4 track only, the other decks were all 1/2 track. The Otari MX5050s are 1/2 track decks with a secondary 1/4 track playback head. With analog tape it is all about surface area. 15ips 1/2 track will give you better SN and HF extension, so the 7 1/2ips 1/4 track ReVox and Tandberg machines can't really compete.

That said, the pro decks from Studer (ReVox parent company) are arguably the best decks ever produced.

Studers and late era Ampex compete with one another. ATR102s are stuuuuupid clean as tape goes.

 

[egellings]

Needed a change of pace so decided to go after a project I planned almost five years ago, namely measuring my Otari MX-5050 BIII-2 Reel to Reel take deck! Otari was the last company in the world making Reel to Reel tape recorders and sadly, ceased production a few years ago. I got my sample from the Reel to Reel master, Ki Choi. I think it cost something like $5,000 to $6,000 new. Used ones go from a range of prices from $2K to $4K from what I see. As always, it is a risky thing to buy one online as conditions of these decks is all over the place and service is not cheap. Mine is extremely clean and as the sub-model indicates, is a more recently sample

Here is a shot of the beast as best as I could fit it in my lightbox:

View attachment 155831

What makes this model unique and valuable among tape heads these days is that it comes with both NAB and IEC equalization. The latter is what is used for a lot of tape production today (what little of it there is). A lot of consumer decks don't support it and require a hack or outboard equalization/amplifier. The fancy red spool is aftermarket which I bought at an audio show. Costs a couple hundred dollars just for that! Blank tapes are $60 from what I recall. And pre-recorded ones like the one on it are $290 but go way up to something like $600. Each! For some 30 minutes of music as these are recorded at 15 inches/second. So not a practical format for most people. But for those of us who wished we had such a nice unit when young and poor, it brings bag fond memories and good listening as you watch the spools turn and meters dance.

Being rather old, there is hardly an measurements of them by today's standards. There is also chicken and egg problem of how to get an accurate test tape. The de-factor ruler in that world is MRL and that is the tape I used for my testing. It has just a set of test tones and it too is very expensive. How good it is, I don't know. The measurements in the box come from a chart recorder! Let's say it is a few generations behind my Audio Precision analyzer.

Otari MX-5050III-2 Measurements
1 kHz tone has been the standard forever in audio and hence it naturally came on the MRL tape so I used it to run our usual dashboard:

View attachment 155832

Distortion is at -57 dB or so but add a bunch of them and some noise and we land at SINAD of 46 dB. It is strange to see the elevated low frequency noise. Subtracting FFT measurement gain gives us a noise floor that is in the 40s! I wanted to see how much of it was the tape format and how much was the machine so I stopped the playback and measured the noise out of the unit:

View attachment 155833

Yuck. There is that rising low frequency noise floor but also a bunch of solid tones. What on earth is the 1 kHz and its harmonics coming from? No wonder folks get outboard electronics for these decks (although who knows how good they are).

BTW, the convention for measuring these older electronics is a-weighting so I thought I turn on that filter and see if SINAD gets better:

View attachment 155834

It goes up 3 dB so that low frequency noise is hurting it some. BTW, this is why I don't use a-weighting in my measurements. It really hides a lot of sins in equipment performance at lower frequencies.

There are skirts around the main tone if you look carefully which indicates jitter/speed variations. Watching the dashboard in real time showed a ton of variations. It is a jarring experience coming from today's systems. At 20 kHz, I measured 19.8 kHz frequency so we have about a 1% speed error.

There is not a whole lot more on the tape than a set of fixed frequencies to measure frequency response. My old Audio Precision analyzer could run a sweep against external sources like this by detecting the frequency and then plotting its level. The new APx555 I have now can't do that. It expect you to record its own sequence on the unit and play that to get asynchronous measurements. So I had to resort to the real-time recorder to plot the frequency on the right, and level on the left:

View attachment 155835

The first frequency is 32 Hz and highest is 19.8 kHz. I set reference at 1 kHz to 0 dB. We see a bass boost at 32 Hz by 1.6 dB or so. And a massive droop at 16 and 20 kHz. Not sure if this is a fault of this unit or in general. It might be this unit as the other channel took a nose dive above 1 kHz! I had cleaned the heads and could see nothing obvious that could cause this externally. Worse yet, I don't know if the tape is bad this way (I assume not but it is possible). I loaned out my last blank tape so need to buy another to record and playback and see how that behaves.

Conclusions
I sort of assumed SINAD would land in 40s and it did. I didn't expect the rest of the garbage this deck produces, nor the one bad channel. Need to find the time to tear it open and see what could be done to improve it. I have not listened to it in months. When I did, my favorite second generation master tape from rock music of 1970s is superb. It easily outperforms the digital ones which have been remastered to death. It is eye and ear popping how much nicer they sound than digital. I often play that tape when people come over first and their jaw drops on the floor in how good it sounds. Tape hiss is there during gaps between tracks and the highs sound a bit distorted to me but neither takes away from enjoyment of that tape. It makes me grin thinking about it as I type this!

Tape gives me the experience of the analog recording without loudness wars and remastering without the limitations and aggravation of LP. I also find the format so much more gorgeous to look at as it plays than anything out there, digital or analog. It is a shame that its popularity has pushed the price of used decks so high.

Anyway, we have first super hard set of measurements of any tape deck now. Gives us some anchoring as far as objective results are concerned.

-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

I had the use of one of these 5050 decks for a while, and the thing's got no right to sound as good as it does.

 

[AudioSceptic]

When I was in college working at the college radio station, we had Crown decks in our main rooms, Pioneer RT1050s for our small production rooms (closets), and a ReVox A77 that was a floater. It sounded fine, but didn't feel very solid. I always felt that I was handling a delicate instrument instead of a tool you could use day in and out and in fact it was frequently on the service bench.

Sound quality? It was 1/4 track only, the other decks were all 1/2 track. The Otari MX5050s are 1/2 track decks with a secondary 1/4 track playback head. With analog tape it is all about surface area. 15ips 1/2 track will give you better SN and HF extension, so the 7 1/2ips 1/4 track ReVox and Tandberg machines can't really compete.

That said, the pro decks from Studer (ReVox parent company) are arguably the best decks ever produced.

Interesting. Pioneer was AFAIK never recognised in the UK as a top reel-to-reel maker. Over here, TEAC was seen as the best Japanese reel-to-reels, with Akai being popular at the budget end.

 

[Mr. Widget]

Interesting. Pioneer was AFAIK never recognised in the UK as a top reel-to-reel maker. Over here, TEAC was seen as the best Japanese reel-to-reels, with Akai being popular at the budget end.

I don't think the Pioneers were considered "top", but they were pretty robust. The 1050H was their "pro" version, but it was really just a high speed 1/2 track version of the standard model with black knobs and side panels. I used a few TEACs back in the day and they were OK... wasn't blown away by them, but they certainly sold the hell out of them.

 

[AudioSceptic]

I don't think the Pioneers were considered "top", but they were pretty robust. The 1050H was their "pro" version, but it was really just a high speed 1/2 track version of the standard model with black knobs and side panels. I used a few TEACs back in the day and they were OK... wasn't blown away by them, but they certainly sold the hell out of them.

Thanks. I didn't really mean "top": I should've said "known for". I don't think I've ever even seen a Pioneer reel-to-reel.

 

[anmpr1]

How would a ReVox of that era compare with the Otari? In Europe at least, ReVox has always had the reputation as the reel-to-reel if you could afford one.

I don't think Otari was ever marketed to home recordists, whereas ReVox was mostly sold as a consumer solution. That said, many were used out in field, for pro remote work. Also, in industrial/AV environments.

For the living room, ReVox decks were hardy and well built, but fairly 'agricultural' in the user friendliness department. From my experience, a top of the line Teac, Akai, Pioneer, Technics, had better home user oriented features, and demonstrated smoother tape handling facilities.

The price of ReVox was considerable, but not outrageous--at least through the various A77 models. The introduction of the A700 was really out of reach for almost all home consumers. Our local ReVox dealer had one on display, but it would have surprised me if he sold many, or any.

Before the two companies split, B77 was marketed as a 'back up' solution for studios (I have a Studer/ReVox flyer around here, somewhere, pushing that aspect).

Cost of factory service for ReVox, compared to, say, Teac, was the difference between getting your Ford Focus or your S600 serviced.

The last of the ReVox branded decks were essentially 'entry level' Studer quality pro decks. Consider the PR99, which was probably (I'm guessing) at least equal if not better than the Otari.

Golden Gear: Studer Revox PR99

The final Revox tape recorders left the factory almost 25 years ago, yet the enthusiasm and support for these classic machines remains as strong as ever.

www.soundonsound.com