Problems playing back old mini DV tapes on new Canon MD160

Hello!

We're a charity putting together a film for our annual fundraising dinner. We have a stack of archive footage on Mini DV that we'd like to use. Not having a Mini DV deck we bought a Canon MD160 to act as a player to transfer the footage for editing. We've passed the camera and the tapes to the film maker we're using but he's emailed us back with this message:

The mini-DV tapes are problematic - I believe it's the camera you gave me. None of the tapes play in it - they all judder and have an echo on the audio. When I try and capture with it the clips come in as small segments with strange audio. I'm sure it's not all the tapes but the camera. I've tried various settings on both camera and computer without any joy. I think it's a combination of the wrong audio sample rate and a DV video issue.

Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be? We're really tight on schedule and don't have much budget left to solve it!