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Well, anything involving FM demodulation is beyond my level of electronics, but at a guess (which may be wrong) it's using the 5.5MHz combined with the tach pulse from the capstan motor to get a beat frequency which is the 300-2400Hz clock on TP2 (or in this case, 7.2KHz which should not be...

Minor clarification: you'll need to check for the tach pulse on TP2 while the machine is playing.

Look for TP2 on the capstan motor controller board. Hook it up to a 'scope and make sure you're getting a periodic waveform. Then hook it up to a frequency counter (good multimeters can do this). You should get a specific frequency, depending on the tape speed: 300Hz for 3.75, 600Hz for 7.5...

Hard to say. The motor controllers are pretty sophisticated on these machines, each one has a PROM chip containing a lookup table of field strengths for the field windings. That said, I've seen one of the reel motors go very slow when a capacitor has failed. The spooling motor board has a...

Last I heard, the heads were practically unobtainable (and they are specific to this machine) so the head condition is the major factor. We've also seen a few people here having the mixer outputs fail to switch properly, caused by one of the logic chips failing. That's less of a problem because...

Cool. It'll be fun to see the production video if you get around to doing that!

Weirdly, you can get cheap 8mm scanners these days, e.g. the Wolverine. They'll accept 8mm or super8, and spit out an MP4 file on SD card. The quality's not going to be on par with a professional scanner costing several grand, but it works pretty well for what it is. If such a thing is viable...

What's doing the electric piano?

This might be of interest, though I don't know if 90 minutes is too thin for these machines: ATR Magnetics ProChrome Master Cassette C90 – Thomann UK If I read that right they're NOS, but still type II.

I suspect they have already done it...

They do look a lot more textured than the erase heads I have, but I don't know the 5050 well enough to know if that's normal. Hopefully someone else here has more experience with them and can chip in. Have you actually tried the machine?

Not on that deck, I'm afraid. On most decks the guide pillars unscrew, often from the top when the head cover is removed (or flipped open if yours does that). The tape lifters, that depends. On some of the cheaper TASCAM decks they're literally welded to the lifter assembly and can't really...

OK, the left-hand head is the eraser. The actual erase elements are normally black, or dark metallic, with the rest of the head surface being plastic. Usually it's white, but it looks like some of the Otari ones are black plastic. From these pictures I can't see anything catastrophically...

The ones where the logo is at the bottom of the box are more likely to work than the ones with the logo in the centre.

This may be useful: Sticky-shed syndrome - Wikipedia ...the links should give you some resources on baking the tapes. A believe a food dehydrator is often useful for this, but (fortunately) I've never needed to do this myself.

Well, it looks like he does format conversion as a service, going by his signature I'd expect him to use the 2" deck for recording anything serious, so the G24 most likely is being used as a playback-only affair. What I did when transferring an 8-track tape on the MSR-24 was to record all 24...

It sounds like he has some 1" 8-track masters from the 60s or 70s and is using the G24 to digitise them. I have done this with the MSR24 and it does work, though the quality is not likely to be as good as an actual 8-track head.

The other thing I wasn't sure about (and I'm assuming the 1/4" and 1/2" decks are similar here) was that pictures of the 5050 motors often seem to show a daughterboard with a voltage selection. If it's really supposed to be running off line voltage, 50v might be too low. That said, if you were...

Also the errors vary with duration. Syncing tracks for a 3:30 minute song is going to be a lot less pain than a 25-minute epic.

Check the motor capacitors. AC motors sometimes have a start and/or run capacitor. Doing a quick search online the 5050 series definitely have run capacitors, but if there is a starter cap as well and that's failed, it would do what you're describing.