The restoration has a destination. These are the projects this site is working toward, in rough order — and like everything else here, the results will be published as they happen.
Two copies of Ted's tapes
The reason for all of it: the reels my father recorded in 1978–1980, preserved twice over. A digital transfer, made with the help of u/fruhfy in Sydney and his high-precision converter and custom amps — and an analog copy onto fresh modern tape from a calibrated, properly aligned machine, so the recordings can also be heard the way they sounded at the time. Everything else on this list serves this.
The whole MX-5050 line
This site started as the manual I couldn't find for one silver-faced machine. It is widening to every generation of the MX-5050 — the Mark II, the B and BII, the 8D and QXD — because parts and instructions for all of them are hard to find, and sometimes impossible. The aim is the same for each: the factory paperwork, the history and the bench notes, in one place, so these machines stay out of landfill and in use for decades to come.
The schematic, redrawn
The tape transport schematic is a scan of a hand-drawn sheet. The ambition: capture it in KiCad — free, open-source, plain-text files — and publish both the KiCad source and a clean PDF/SVG next to the original. A schematic you can search, print and edit, not just squint at.
New copies of the boards
Scan each circuit board, redraw it in KiCad, and publish the design files plus fab-ready Gerbers, so a fresh board is an upload and a few dollars away for anyone whose original is beyond saving. First candidate: the P-12 speed board — small, single-sided, already photographed here. The schematic and the board files check each other — the netlist has to match — so each redraw proofreads the other.
Complete the manuals archive
The first generation is done. As of August 2026 every slot on its shelf is filled: the sales brochures were found and scanned; the "service manual" slot turned out to be chasing a document Otari never published (the maintenance manual already is the factory's service book); and the last and rarest piece, the OIM-1005E operation manual — a book no scan of had ever surfaced online — arrived as an original paper copy through the Brisbane tape community, scanned here at 1200 dpi, and now has its own digital edition.
The same job now runs across the whole line. Every document here numbers 27 held books, sheets and schematics, twelve of them transcribed as digital editions, and seven slots still open:
- Mark II — sales literature: a brochure or spec sheet. Its manual turned out to be OMM-1002E, already held.
- MX-5050B — the instruction manual, OS1-011, the operator's half of the book OS2-004 supplements.
- B-II — service documentation beyond the instruction manual and the 1988 alignment procedures.
- MARK III — the MARK III/2 operation manual and the III/4, III/8 and BQ-II data sheets. A copy of the first is held by the Library of Congress.
- MARK IV — manuals for the MKIV-4, MKIV-8 and BQIII, and the earlier editions of OS3-298.
Held is only the first half; the ambition is scanned and transcribed, so the words are searchable and the figures readable. That is what the first generation got, and what each of the others should get in turn.
Still to do on this machine
Each of these follows the factory procedure in the maintenance manual:
- Transport inspection and lubrication, and head condition and demagnetisation — Tape Transport Maintenance.
- A capacitor and component survey of the preamp cards — Major Component Replacement Procedures.
Playback alignment and record bias and level are done, and written up as Calibrating the MX-5050.
How it is listened to
The sound bar here only takes optical, so the chain is: XLR line out → XLR-to-RCA cable → analog-to-digital converter → optical in. The same converter did duty on the Akai X-150D during the warm-up. Whether that counts as running unbalanced is an open question; there was nothing extra to do. Plug in, press play, it worked.