Those of you who remember my last review of a Xymox product, may recall that in the end, I was so singularly unimpressed with it I ended up selling it, still in the box, to someone else.
I hope he's happy with it, because the future of the company remains unclear.
If you want the full, sordid story, you can avail yourself by checking out the FB group, Xymox Percussion - Buyer Beware. In short, the owners have fled souther California and moved to Washington State, where operations have resumed, purportedly in a large garage somewhere in Yakima.
Meanwhile, dozens of Xymox pads are now popping up on web sites like eBay, Offerup and Mercari. Barely used tenor pads are selling for between $150 and $200, while Reserve Snare pads in various states of usage/damage are going for as little as $40. So even if the company is still trying to ship new product (including orders that are up to a year overdue), the offloading of so much product all at once could combine with the growing mountain of complaints to devalue the Xymox brand.
I own two Xymox pads as part of my collection, and will likely keep one of them for the long term.
This one, an early-generation Rubber pad with "snare" sound, probably dates from just after Xymox patented its "snare" sound mechanism in 2000. I used this pad in the studio when recording drum tracks for The Watchman's Chair in late 2019, and I still enjoy playing it.
It's a great little pad, it travels well and the rebound is pretty satisfying for an early-2000's pad in the Kevlar era.
I choce it for the studio recording because the volume would be easier to control underneath vocals and guitar.
The other pad I still own is a later-era Reserve pad -- though curiously, this one does not have the "snare" sound mechanism.
It's just a very heavy practice pad with a thin rubber surface covered by a carbon fiber laminate.
In this case, I bought the pad used, and when it got to me, I discovered that the laminate was no longer glued down securely. So I could lift it off and just play on the rubber, which gave a different feel and sound.
But in the long run, I don't see any reason to keep this pad, and I will probably re-home it at some point.
And therein lies the challenge with owning a Xymox pad. It's a marching-specific pad for those who play exclusively on Kevlar-carbon heads at a very high tension. If you play a drumkit, or an older-style marching drum with Mylar heads, the laminated Xymox pad won't be very useful for you. It's designed for modern marching drummers, and marketed to young people in high school and college drum lines. Unfortunately, Xymox failed to understand that a high school drummer atracted to the color and style of their pads wouldn't necessarily find the wait-time attractive. Young people expect timely delivery, and if they don't get it they often move on to something else; a LOT of young marching drummers have done just that, choosing to buy a pad they wouldn't have to wait months or even years for.
A number of consumers -- mostly very angry parents who shelled out to buy the practice pad of their child's dreams -- are gathering online in chat rooms and groups to discuss the possibility of assembling a class-action lawsuit against the company. Meanwhile, young drummers who managed to get -- and wear out -- their first Xymox pads are selling them and buying something else (two of the most popular brands besides Xymox seem to be Offworld, whose pads are in high demand among college and drum corps players for their durability; and Beetle, a small-batch company making pads from recycled tires in the United States. For drummers on a budget, the Evans Real Feel is a fine practice pad that offers slightly more versatility than these aforementioned marching-specific pads).
So it remains to be seen what will happen with Xymox Percussion and their legal and financial issues. I'm not holding my breath, and probably won't keep more than one Xymox pad in my collection going forward.
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