Acrolites are just awesome! They are everything a snare drum should be. They sound great. They sound like a snare drum! Ludwig was just so superior in terms of doing business back then, they flooded the student-drummer market with Acrolites and gave many young players a superior drum for less money than anyone else could do. They are everywhere because they stood the test of time and no one has come up with a better, basic snare drum ever since!

I often laugh (or at least snicker a bit) when people start breaking down the nuances of "their' snare drum sound. Gimme a break! No one could differentiate most snare drums in a blindfold test. Sure, there will be a difference between a shell made from a cast iron pipe and one made from balsa wood, but, those are the extremes. The middle ground snare drum sound is where most people play and, in that area, there isn't enough qualitative information to clearly distinguish one from the other. I'd wager that no one could tell the difference between a $30 Acrolite and a Rogers Dynasonic and a Slingerland whatever and a Gretsch whatever snare drum in a blindfold test. It's a fact that most of the snare drum sounds that we hear on recordings is a Ludwig metal shell drum of some kind (usually a Supra)...and that's even when we know the drummers on those recordings ENDORSE another brand! LOL!

There needs to be another qualifier in a blindfold test. Some people actually like their snare drums to sound like they are pounding on a wet oat meal box with a couple of pennies bouncing on the head. That is 180 degrees from the way I want my snare drum to sound. As I stated earlier in this topic, I want my snare drum to sound like a whip crack. And I do not want any ringiness. This is why I prefer a wood shell over a metal shell. The Acrolite sounds very much like a wood shell drum when tensioned tightly.

I couldn't agree with that any more.

I can definitely hear the difference between these snare drums.

[ame]https://youtu.be/NRK5BZdBZ6U[/ame]

Absolutely. But if that were a blindfold test I wouldn’t be able to identify with any confidence which drum was which. If I’m being totally honest, I could probably be convinced it was one drum with variety of tunings, muffling, etc.

What he said..................................................

I think you could pick out the marcher.Walking

Yeah, the marcher was the only one with any appreciable difference. Most of them sounded very similar....and if you weren't hearing them in that context, then you'd likely not be able to differentiate any of them.

When the custom drum company fad came out (late 90's/early 2000's) all of a sudden, every other garage had someone making snare drums in them. I remember how in-depth it got. It was ridiculous...(but kinda fun, in a way, too)...The end result was a bunch of esoteric shells and waaaaay overbuilt throwoff designs, combined with the brass lugs machined from hex nuts, screw-together grommets and gigantic rectangular badges that were screwed onto the shell...They all sounded like snare drums, but I remember how people used to go on and on about how titanium was "drier" sounding than steel and bubinga wood was similar to paduak -but really more of a sycamore sound....Come on!

When two drums are extremely different -a la a marcher vs. a piccolo snare or something like that, then the sound will be easier to tell a difference. I am speaking only in terms of the average sound of a snare drum when used in context of a drum set. They are really difficult to differentiate. And, furthermore, in the context of playing a drum set in a band, it's even more difficult to differentiate one from another.

There was a drum sound test I remember someone doing a few years ago, where they took the same drums and tunings and had several different players come in and play them. Even though the drums were unchanged, the individual drummers made them sound unique. Therefore, I can conclude that it's really not about the drums so much as it is about the drummers.

Another issue is the recording engineer who will tweak "your snare drum sound" to how that engineer thinks the snare drum should sound.