The half-inch eight-track: a different machine
This is not the machine this site is about.
The MX-5050-8 is a half-inch, eight-channel studio recorder. The machine this site documents is the quarter-inch, two-track first-generation MX-5050 — the Mark I, the one Otari called the Mini Pro. They share a name, a face and a transport lineage, and almost nothing else that matters: not the tape width, not the track count, not the market, and emphatically not the price. In 1976 the two-track sold in America for $1,450; the eight-track for $3,995.
If you came here looking for the silver-face two-track, you want the Mark I's history, or Is it a Mini Pro? if you have a machine in front of you and want to know what it is. This page exists so that the eight-channel machine stops getting in your way — and so that what is actually known about it is written down somewhere, with the paper behind it.
Everything below is sourced by linking out to worldradiohistory.com, which preserved these scans. Nothing about the eight-track is mirrored or transcribed here. The press archive on this site is for the machine this site is about, and that is a deliberate line.
The debut: a year earlier than most accounts give↑ TOP
The eight-channel machine is routinely dated to 1976. It was announced, in print, in 1975 — and its first appearance is in the British trade press, under a name it would soon lose.
Studio Sound's preview of the eighth APRS exhibition, in its July 1975 issue, runs down the exhibitors' stands and reaches Industrial Tape Applications — ITA, then Otari's UK distributor:
From Otari comes a number of new machines, principally the MX 5058 in eight channel format on 12.5 mm tape. Basis is the deck and electronics of the 5050 stereo 6.25 mm, a portable recorder with motion sensing, logic control, XLRs, sel sync and additional quarter track replay head.
That is the eight-track's earliest sighting I have found, and it is worth reading closely. It is a half-inch, eight-channel machine built on the two-track's deck and electronics — the trade press understood the relationship immediately, and stated it in one sentence.
Two cautions the print record itself forces on us.
The show was not in July. The APRS exhibition ran at the Connaught Rooms in London in June 1975; Studio Sound's July-dated issue previewed it, as UK monthlies of the period did. (The issue cannot even agree with itself on the days: the preview text says "Thursday and Friday June 20 and 21", while the APRS's own advertisement a few pages earlier says "JUNE 19&20".) So the machine's announcement is July-1975 print, and the show it was announced for was June 1975. Those are different facts and this page keeps them apart.
And a preview is a statement of intent, not a sighting. Studio Sound says plainly that its list records "what they expected to show when asked in mid-April". I have not been able to establish that the eight-channel machine was actually on ITA's stand at APRS. The magazine's own show report, which this site mirrors for other reasons — Studio Sound, September 1975 — walks the same ITA stand and names only "the MX-5050 'Mini-pro' giving two or four channels on 6.25 mm tape". The eight-track it does describe on that stand is ITA's own Itam 805, at £1,790. Either the Otari eight-channel machine did not make the show, or the reporter did not write it down. The record does not say which.
The prices, and where they come from↑ TOP
In Britain: £1,920 + VAT. ITA advertised the machine in Studio Sound for November 1975 — a full-page multitrack spread, on PDF page 5 — as:
OTARI MX5058. New ½″ 8 channel from Otari, Japan's largest manufacturers of studio equipment. Rugged reliability. £1920 + VAT
The same advertisement prices the two-channel MX5050 at £440 + VAT and the four-channel at £590 + VAT — which is the clearest single statement of the gap between the machine this site is about and this one. ITA ran the ad again in December 1975.
In America: just under $4,000. Otari took the machine to the 52nd AES convention in New York — 31 October to 3 November 1975, per Otari's own booth advertisement in Billboard. Billboard's AES report, on 15 November 1975, printed page 48:
Otari showed two new 8-track tape recorders. The MX-7308 features 8 tracks on one-inch tape with 15/30 or 7 1/2/15 ips options, and +4 or +8 dBm balanced outputs. The console-mounted version with remote control facility is $8550. The 8 track, ½ inch MX-5050-8 sells for just under $4,000.
Billboard's preview a fortnight earlier had trailed it — "Otari Corp. will have its complete MX 5050 line on view, including a 2-channel, quad and two 8-channel recorders" — and Studio Sound's own report of the same convention, in January 1976, found that "greatest activity was from Otari, introducing two new recorders and a high speed duplicating system", the MX-5050-8 among them.
So: November 1975, just under $4,000, on the AES floor in New York. Both central claims hold, and both hold from period print.
The lost name↑ TOP
In every British sighting of 1975 the machine is the MX 5058: Studio Sound's July preview, ITA's November advertisement, ITA's December advertisement. In every American sighting it is the MX-5050-8, from the first — Billboard, November 1975.
Then the British name simply stops. "MX 5058" does not appear in any issue of Studio Sound I have read from January 1976 to March 1977, by which point the UK press writes MX-5050-8 like everyone else. The name had a working life of about six months, on one side of one ocean.
Did Otari itself ever use it? I have found no Otari-branded advertisement or document that does — every piece of the maker's own material here says MX-5050-8, MX-5050-8SD or MX-5050-8D. But an absence is not a proof, and this page will not dress one up as the other: what is established is that the name belongs to the UK trade press and its distributor, and that no Otari source found so far uses it.
DC servo from day one↑ TOP
Where the two-track sold the DC capstan servo as an option, the eight-channel machine had it as standard — and that is not an inference, it is Otari saying so. From the maker's own advertisement in db, April 1976:
also available in four channel (¼ inch) and eight channel (½ inch), the eight channel with dc capstan servo as standard.
Audio's October 1976 Annual Equipment Directory
prints the same split in the flat language of a table: the base MX-5050's
capstan cell carries both hys and dc, while the eight-track's carries
dc alone. And the UK advertisement of November 1976 lists, among the
machine's features, "Variable speed (+ or − 10%) dc capstan servo standard".
Three sources, one answer — though they corroborate rather than confirm each other independently, and it is worth saying which is which. Two are advertising (Otari's own, and its UK distributor's), and a directory's specifications come from the manufacturer that filled in the form. All three trace back to Otari. They agree, nothing in the record contradicts them, and that is the strength of the claim — no more. If you are trying to date or identify a first-generation two-track, the servo is an options-list item — see what the first generation actually is. On the eight-channel machine it was never optional at all.
The designations, with their dates — and not in a chain↑ TOP
Five names attach to this machine over roughly six years. It is tempting to
sequence them into a tidy 8 → 8D → 8SD progression. The evidence does not
support that, and this page will not invent it.
| Designation | First seen here | Source |
|---|---|---|
| MX 5058 | July 1975 (UK) | Studio Sound, APRS preview |
| MX-5050-8 | November 1975 (US) | Billboard, AES report |
| MX-5050-8SD | November 1976 (UK) | Studio Sound, C. E. Hammond's full-page ad |
| MX-5050-8D | January 1978 (US) | db, January 1978 |
| MARK III/8 | July 1981 | RE/P, June 1981 — see the wider family |
An 8SD in November 1976 and an 8D in January 1978 is the wrong way round for a simple progression: the more-suffixed name arrives first, and the less-suffixed one arrives fourteen months later. Either the two designations overlapped — a UK-market code and a US-market code, or a varispeed variant sold alongside a plainer one — or one of these readings is wrong. The order is not established. What is established is that both names were in print, on those dates, in those magazines. That is what the table says, and it is all it says.
The 8SD is not a stray, either. Otari's own factory maintenance manual for the MARK II covers "MODELS MX-5050 MKII-2, QXD, MKII-4 AND 8SD" — filing the 8SD alongside first-generation model codes, as the wider family page sets out.
Why the world dates it to 1976↑ TOP
Because Studio Sound introduced the machine as new more than once, and the loudest time was the second.
- July 1975 — the APRS preview, as the MX 5058.
- January 1976 — the AES report: Otari "introducing two new recorders".
- October 1976 — the Survey: Studio Mastering Machines, with a full MX-5050-8 entry at $4,000.
- November 1976 — "Three new professional recorders are being introduced by the Otari Corporation", the MX-5050-8 among them (mirrored here) — and, in the same issue, a full-page advertisement for "THE NEW MX 5050 8SD", half-inch and eight-channel, at "UNDER £2,500", DC capstan servo standard, "also available in 4-CHANNEL and STEREO VERSIONS". It is placed by C. E. Hammond & Company, of Byfleet, Surrey — not ITA. Otari's UK distribution had changed hands somewhere between the two.
The 1976 material is fatter, more visible and easier to find: a survey entry, a launch round-up and a full page of advertising, all in two consecutive months. The 1975 material is one paragraph in a show preview and a corner of a distributor's ad. So 1976 is what gets cited. It is a year late.
Its rival, and a distributor in the middle↑ TOP
The obvious competitor is the TASCAM 80-8, and the two machines can be put side by side out of a single source. Studio Sound's October 1976 survey lists both, in the same format class:
| Otari MX-5050-8 | TASCAM 80-8 | |
|---|---|---|
| Tape | 12.5 mm (½″) | 12.5 mm (½″) |
| Tracks | 8 | 8 |
| Price, as listed | $4,000 | £1,960 (≈ $3,500) |
One caveat the table cannot carry: the survey prints the Otari's price in dollars — a US list price — and the TEAC's in pounds. At the 1976 rate of about $1.80 to the pound, £1,960 comes to roughly $3,500 — which is also the 80-8's US list price, so the dollar gap was real but modest. The sharp undercut was the British one: £1,960 against the MX-5050-8SD's "under £2,500" of the following month — and sterling was falling so fast that autumn that Hammond's own advertisement asterisks its price "subject to foreign exchange variances". The TASCAM undercut the Otari in Britain, and did so from a familiar address. ITA advertised the TASCAM 80-8 in that same October issue — "for people with more talent than money" — from the same Pratt Street address that had sold the MX 5058 a year before.
It is tempting to tell that as a story, in which ITA drops Otari for the machine that undercut it. The scans, read properly, do not support it. What they show is less tidy:
- The move to Hammond had already happened by October. The same October 1976 survey lists Otari's UK distributor as C. E. Hammond & Co of Byfleet. The November full-page 8SD advertisement confirmed the arrangement; it did not begin it.
- ITA kept advertising Otari anyway. A full-page ITA advertisement for the MX 5050 line — 2, 4 and 8 channel — runs in the same November 1976 issue as Hammond's ad, and ITA's December "London's Multitrack Centre" page still lists Otari eight-channel recorders. Whatever passed between Otari and ITA was an overlap or a wind-down, not a door slamming. That December advertisement's TASCAM listing, for what it is worth, covers only mixers — not the 80-8.
- ITA was never a one-marque house, and TASCAM did not arrive in Britain through it. ITA's own Itam 805 — the half-inch eight-track already met on the APRS stand above — sold for £1,790, under both machines. And the first TASCAM half-inch eight-track advertised in Britain was offered by REW Professional Audio of Charing Cross Road in December 1975, "available for the first time in the UK and Europe" — ten months before ITA's advertisement.
By April 1977 the separation is complete and in print: Otari's own factory advertisement in Wireless World names C. E. Hammond as its UK agent, while ITA — by then at Harewood Avenue — advertises TEAC, Revox and its own mixers, with no Otari anywhere on the page.
So the rivalry between the machines is real: same tape, same track count, same survey, the TASCAM cheaper. The rivalry at Pratt Street ran three ways — Otari's machine, TEAC's and ITA's own, side by side in one catalogue. Who left whom, and why, is not in the record I have found. A distributor selling its own eight-track and TEAC's beside Otari's gives the maker as much reason to walk as the dealer had to push. If the answer survives, it is likely a distributor-appointment note in a 1976 trade news column; until someone finds it, the dates and the advertisements are what they are.
Where it went↑ TOP
The MX-5050-8 was superseded by the MARK III/8 in July 1981, per RE/P of June 1981 — the MARK name only swallowed the wide formats at MARK III, and the eight-track was the first machine to carry it. That story belongs to the wider family, which follows the MARK machines properly.
And none of it touches the Mark I. The silver-face quarter-inch two-track came first, cost a third as much, and is a different machine in every way that matters. It is the one this site is about.
Sources for this page↑ TOP
All link-outs to worldradiohistory.com, which scanned and preserved these issues. Nothing here is mirrored on this site.
- Studio Sound, July 1975 (PDF) — "APRS Exhibition 1975: a preview", printed page 32. The MX 5058's first appearance in print, on ITA's stand list. The preview's own preamble, on printed page 27, gives the show's dates and the mid-April deadline.
- Studio Sound, November 1975 (PDF) — ITA's multitrack advertisement, PDF page 5: the MX5058 at £1,920 + VAT, beside the two- and four-channel MX5050 at £440 and £590. Repeated in December 1975 (PDF), PDF page 5. The same December issue carries REW Professional Audio's advertisement, PDF page 69, for "the sensational TASCAM ½″ 8-Track Studio Recorder... available for the first time in the UK and Europe" — TASCAM's half-inch eight-track entering Britain through Charing Cross Road, not Pratt Street.
- Studio Sound, August 1976 (PDF) — ITA's Otari spread: the MX 5050 in 2-, 4- and 8-channel versions "from £590", the one-inch MX 7308 at £4,450, with the reply coupon addressed to 5 Pratt Street. ITA still carrying the line in high summer.
- Billboard, 15 November 1975 (PDF) — the AES convention report, printed page 48: the MX-5050-8 "sells for just under $4,000". The 1 November issue (PDF, printed page 47) previews Otari's booth, and the 8 November issue (PDF) carries Otari's own advertisement giving the convention dates, "Oct. 31–Nov. 3".
- Studio Sound, January 1976 (PDF) — "New York: AES 52nd Convention", printed pages 18–19: Otari "introducing two new recorders", the MX-5050-8 on 12.5 mm tape among them.
- Studio Sound, October 1976 (PDF) — "Survey: Studio Mastering Machines". The MX-5050-8 entry at $4,000 is transcribed on this site because the same survey carries the two-track. The TASCAM 80-8 entry, at £1,960, is on PDF page 54, and ITA's TASCAM advertisement on PDF page 47. The survey's Otari entry lists the UK distributor as C. E. Hammond & Co Ltd of Byfleet — the earliest sighting of the change found so far.
- Studio Sound, November 1976 (PDF) — C. E. Hammond's full-page advertisement for the MX 5050 8SD, PDF page 63 (printed page 65). The issue's AES round-up, on PDF page 31, is mirrored here for its first-generation content. The same issue carries ITA's TASCAM advertisement again, PDF page 9, and — in the same issue as Hammond's ad — ITA's own full-page Otari advertisement, PDF page 13.
- Studio Sound, December 1976 (PDF) — ITA's "London's Multitrack Centre" advertisement, still listing Otari stereo, 4-channel and 8-channel recorders; its TASCAM listing covers only the Model 2, 3 and 5 mixers.
- Wireless World, April 1977 (PDF) — Otari's own factory advertisement, featuring the MX 5050 8SD and naming "U.K.: C. E. Hammond & Co., Ltd."; ITA's advertisement in the same issue, from 1–7 Harewood Avenue, carries TEAC, Revox and ITA's own mixer, with no Otari.
Two sources on this site are quoted above rather than linked out, because they are two-track sources that happen to mention the eight-channel machine: db, April 1976 and Audio, October 1976, with db, January 1978 for the 8D.
Corrections wanted, particularly on two points. If you can show the eight-channel machine actually standing on ITA's APRS stand in June 1975, or can settle the order of the 8SD and the 8D with a dated Otari document, this page will be gladly rewritten. Serial plates, brochures, manuals and dealer paperwork all welcome — the eight-track is thinly documented, and everything above is only as good as the paper behind it.