Tascam ES-51
A rack-mounted controller that made four tape machines chase one timecode. Used ones still command real money.
Overview
The ES-51 is the control half of Tascam's ES-50/ES-51 synchronizer pair, and that matters if you're shopping. The ES-50 is the box that actually reads and generates timecode. The ES-51 is the controller that tells it what to do. Tascam introduced the combination as a system, and contemporary coverage treated them as a unit. Mix (March 1988, p.135) ran the ES-50/ES-51 Synchronizer/Controller alongside the ATR-60 and ATR-80 tape machines and the M-600 console as the pieces of a complete tape-based production package aimed at post-production rooms running around the clock.
The headline capability, per Tascam's own AES-show announcement as reported at the time, was expansion: the ES-51 controller allowed the synchronizer system to grow to as many as four machines. For a video-post or multitrack room in the late '80s, that was the whole point — you bought the ES-50 to lock a slave deck to a master, then added the ES-51 when the session grew into a three- or four-deck chase. Electronic Musician's AES roundup described the same architecture: an ES-50 synchronizer plus ES-51 controller, paired with an ATR-60 mastering recorder and a console, constituted a complete tape-based audio production system.
The ES-51 does not work as a standalone synchronizer, and the used market is full of people who bought one expecting that. It is a controller. It needs its ES-50 to function as a sync system, and period listings show the two were almost always sold and resold together. A 1992 classified in Electronic Musician listed "3 ES-50s & ES-51 controller with all cables" as a single lot. If you find an ES-51 alone, budget for hunting down its ES-50.
NovaStar built the NSS-1 serial video edit controller specifically to drive the ES-50 or ES-51. It offered jog, shuttle, and master insert recording, the kind of edit-room workflow the system was designed around, as noted in Mix (September 1991, p.?).
A 1991 Mix dealer ad (September 1991) listed the ES-50 and ES-51 together at $2,493 as a floor-model closeout - "below even dealer cost," the seller claimed. That suggests the system's street price had fallen hard by the early '90s as tape-based post gave way to disk. UK listings in Studio Sound around the same period put a used ES-51 controller with cables at £595 and an ES-50 synchronizer at £1,300 each. By 1992-93, complete ES-50/ES-51 systems were trading in US classifieds for around $1,000 - $1,700 depending on condition and cabling.
The ES-51 was never a glamorous piece. It's a rack box that makes other rack boxes behave. Collectors and working studios chasing SMPTE-chased analog multitrack workflow still want the pair, and period listings repeatedly emphasize "with all cables," because the interconnect between ES-50 and ES-51 is the part that goes missing and the part that's hardest to replace.
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