Man, I played one of those free floating snare drums and it was really dead. It had SO much mass and weight and gadgetry. I think all the stuff they did to try and get the shell to float, ended up choking the it, instead. It just didn't work. Plus, it wasn't really a free floating shell anyway.
The only thing that came close to a floating shell was the Peavey (Volpe) Radial Pro 1000 tom tom/ bass drum design. This was, essentially, two frame drums joined by a "naked" shell. And guess what? IT WORKED! The shell part was permanently attached to the radial bridges, but this made it possible for them to make a shell extremely thin (3mm). And, man, those babies sound wonderful -best pure tom sound I've ever heard. But, they were also quite fragile and not good candidates for setting up/tearing down every night. In addition, because the drums were so costly to make, Peavey cut every corner they could and used the absolute cheapest metal parts in the world. Anything about them that was metal, was pure #$%^&!
They also made a plastic bridge version -the Radial Pro 500...but those didn't sound the same.
