Otari MX5050BII
A two-track workhorse that broadcasters bought by the dozen — and then trusted with the air signal itself.
Overview
The most telling thing about the MX5050BII isn't in any spec sheet. It's that a Florida beautiful-music station with the highest listening share in the country, WDUV-FM, stocked ten of them alongside four MkIII machines and had already been running Otari ARS-1000 reproducers in its automation racks for years. The reliability of that earlier gear is what pushed the station to buy Otari recorders exclusively. When a broadcaster puts ten identical two-tracks on the floor, that's not a review — that's a purchasing decision made by people who get fired when the station goes silent.
The MX5050BII was a fixture of the broadcast and production world through the 1980s. That's the context the deck lived in — not a hi-fi rack, but a working studio where it shared space with cart machines and a broadcast console. Period classified advertising from the era, such as the used-gear listings in Recording Engineer (June 1990, p.71), shows how such professional machines circulated through the secondhand market.
Collectors note that Otari built a small ecosystem around the MX5050BII and its MkIII sibling. Anvil made a dedicated shipping and storage case for the model, listed at $254.00 and sold through broadcast suppliers at $227.95. P0100 offered a table-top console — a rugged, economical replacement for the deck's two side panels that installed with the existing screws — at $89.95. Those accessories tell you something the spec sheets can't: this was a machine people moved, racked, and reconfigured, and the aftermarket grew up around keeping it portable and protected.
The deck's reputation for reliability is the through-line in the surviving documentation. The WDUV facility that went on air January 5, 1987 was designed for hurricane survivability and redundancy, and the Otari two-tracks were part of a patch system that let any source in any room reach any other room or the air. That kind of routing flexibility only works if the machines themselves don't need babysitting.
What the record doesn't give up easily is the hard numbers. Production years for the BII variant specifically aren't confirmed in the available material, and the careful distinction between the MX5050BII, the MX5050BQII, the MX5050 MkIII, and the MX5050/2 matters — these are separate machines, and mixing their specs is how bad information spreads. Anyone shopping for one should verify the exact variant before assuming a spec carries over.
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