Zitat:2245: Please if you have time, take a look at TDK SA and MA, I've changed some of the "Made in" descriptions. Can it stay that way?
I don't know if all the AH... cassettes... were put Luxembourg tape, or Japanese tape, or both.
In the case of the metal tapes, you said they were probably only made in Japan. But SA are questionable.
Still there is a lack of hard facts...
If AH is Rammelsbach, wich is highly likely... of course all AH Cassettes from 1986 to 1991 are loaded with tape from Japan.
After that, when Basharage started to coat tape it went to a mix of both, japanese and EU made tape.
With most probably growing supply from Basharage over the next few years.
When you open a new coating line abroad to supply two factories that are molding and assembling you most probably focus on the best sellers to easily get high self-suffiency numbers for those assembling lines. So, Basharage for sure coated SA/SF and D tape... Is that all? ...probably not... did they coat almost every kind of TDK tape? Even AR-X. M-AX, MA-XG... I don't think so...
For Metal tapes it's just a guess, it's possible that all metal tapes were coated in Japan, because of the very low demand, only 1-2% of all Cassettes were metal.
This includes all blank cassettes sold in the EU, so it is highly possible that for TDK the number is more like 2-4% especially after 1989 when metal tapes prices were almost down to premium Type II tapes.
But still, this is not much, so it should have made sense to still coat all the demand in one factory... but I don't know for sure.
For the last series of TDK Metal tapes from Germany 1997-2001, it's clearly a different formulation with lower electroacoustic properties.
It could be that this formulation was coated in Basharage, but I don't have any japanese TDK MA from that time to compare.
Maybe the change was made in Japan for cost cutting, maybe Basharag even coated the early 90s MA tape as well. Up to now, we don't know!