I have had trouble with my Hitachi VM-H720A camcorder and ran into an outdated posted question answer topic and solution on a Google web search regarding this same problem. I had a shop adjust the tracking on my camcorder because it was drifting and now the newly recorded tapes work great, but I have the same problems with old tapes where sound is missing and the video is noisy. I'd like to learn how to manually adjust the tape guides, so I can play back the old tapes and record them digitally. I got close to removing the side cover so I could make possible adjustments to the tape guides, but got to the point where I did not want to try and remove any more screws and slide out cover pieces etc. It looks like there are two tape guides that pick up the tape and wrap it around the recording/playback head. I'm thinking that those are the guides referenced because they each have a tiny phillips head set screw to hold them in place (in guessing at this from observing the process with the tape cover plate removed).
Does anyone have access to a manual or procedure to remove the cover over the tape assembly? Maybe the tapes would play back OK with a different Hi8 camcorder. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.