I was trying, but couldn't seem to locate that old thread... I think it was mostly about the tuning of Bonham's kit, but I recall there was some discussion and belief that Bonham used a device similar to a "Richie Ring" (i.e. cut a ring from an old bass head and applied it to his new bass head to control the tone/dampen overtones).

The basic argument went that there was a ring shape shadow that indicated the use of the ring. However I'd state that is an incorrect assumption.

The first issue I would consider is how are they applying the ring... was his tech running around with a bottle of Elmer's glue or rubber cement to keep the ring from coming loose and flopping around / making noise? I don't think so, especially considering the wide-open tuning for the sound he preferred. He certainly didn't muffle the toms externally (no telling if he applied a bit of dampening with the internal mufflers, but I think not) as I haven't seen any photos with tea towels or tape. I'm even hard pressed to find photographic evidence of the common felt strips on the bass drum, as they usually photograph quite easily through the heads and many players left the tails on the factory felt strip in those days (which were more easily spotted when placed on the reso head) It's easier to spot Bonham's felt strip positioning on the Vista kit, like Carmen Appice's, on the lower portion of the bass batter head.

So what are we seeing photographically? Well first a bit about the heads. The heads have some properties that affects the light that hits the head and at times can seem quite opaque and other fairly transparent. Our eyes take that reflected light in and then the mind interprets that and to produce an image for us. The combination of camera and film obviously is quite different from our organic process. Primarily at issue are what a lens can resolve, what the film can record, and how long it is recording. As it merely is a fraction of a second in time that is captured in film it shows us a different reality that we might not otherwise be aware of. At certain angles that head will be far less opaque (and even seemingly transparent) to the snapshot of the lens/camera/film than to our continuously flowing eye/mind.

So I guess that is a long winded way of saying that we're merely seeing the inside of the drum, in some of those photos, and not the precursor to the Richie Ring. Photographically it appears as a concentric ring in some pictures and is due to the photographer being in the right place (angle) at the right time to record the converging lines (i.e., things that are f-a-r-ther away appear smaller) in the 2-D photograph. At times we can see portions of the drum near the reso head and other times we are seeing the portions of the drum near the batter head.

So I have attached some pics from the interwebz to help clarify...

The first pic is of JHB on the famous green sparkle kit and you can clearly see what appears to be a ring is merely the shell of the drum converging until it hits the bearing edge and disappears for us.

The second pic is of the Vista kit and I added some blue highlight to show that back portion of the drum with that convergence effect.

The third pic is in the studio with the Thermo kit and you can faintly see the same convergence effect (exaggerated due to the use of a wide angle lens), which I've added the blue highlights to again.

Last pic (color added) is with JHB again on the green sparkle kit and I highlighted what I think is the trimmed back felt strip on the bass drum. I haven't seen any other clean shots of what may be a felt strip???

I think this has been posted before, but it looks like Jason Bonham took some video of from Hyde Park... not sure if these are the real deal or not, but interesting anyways.

[ame]https://youtu.be/VE-5hV4nS1o[/ame]