probably ,no valid reason. pricing is often unrelated to quality. Tama probably took a gamble that a certain # of people would "fork" over that amount of cash to buy an illusion. Fork's Drum Closet is giving you a "bargain" at that price but accepting offers too. Clearly the drum isn't selling, otherwise they wouldn't be pushing it on ebay.-------Featuring it with an ill-tuned Gretsch bass drum too.

Two words......bell brass.

The older Tama ones have no problem reaching 2 grand or more from what I remember.

Maybe it has a gold sheets between the shell plies...

bells are made from bronze. ----and fine hand poured, hand milled,hand hammered cymbals are made from bell bronze sometimes and they sell for between under 100 and not much more than 600.00, depending on size. Which do you think , takes more skill and fine materials to make: a cymbal or a drum shell? the Tama drum is actually made of smoke and mirrors-----that's the secret ellusive ingredient.

The Tama bell brass are 3mm shells, verse a 1.5 mm thick shell on the normal brass snares. I looked at one 10 years ago and I believe the new price then was in the $1500 range for a new snare. I believe that low volume help keep the price high or maybe its the other way around. Wish I had one but its pretty much always been out of my price range.......

3mm is about 1/8" .------- you can buy a 12" x 48" strip of 1/8" brass in various alloy formulations 260,353, 464 for about 200.00 off the shelf. Cut it in two and you have enough to make 2, 6" snare drums. Take them to a machine shop or metal fabricating shop and have them rolled and welded/soldered. You can get high quality off the shelf hardware, cast hoops and for about 400.00 each at retail prices you could make two of them.-----of course it wouldn't be "Bell Brass". You could sell one and recover part of the cost of the keeper. I have no idea where you can get the smoke and mirrors from.

Like the Sonors, Zildjian Noble & Cooley, etc. This drum is sand cast from melted bronze. Not an easy task. As a drum builder I've been looking at melting my old cracked Z's into a shell. Finding out it there is more to it than just melting the metal and pouring into a mold. If it's not done right, you can have air bubbles known as tearing, or worse, the metal cooling before completely filling the mold. Having talked to N&C about the original Z shells, the metal doesn't do well when melted a second or 3rd time. So I'm trying to get it right the first time. It's no wonder Tama, Sonor, & Ocheltree charge $2500+ for these drums......

And Calf, there is a huge sound difference between a rolled/welded shell and a casted shell..

I'm a tama dealer , and i think that snare if crazy in price . i would be after a vintage bell brass tama any day over that snare .

Some of the vintage ones also have massive bell brass hoops as well. A friend has one, the thing is easily 30 lbs. not my thing, but massively overbuilt and beautiful in a certain way.