Product Review: HUN U-12 Marching Drum Pad

Once I realized that the RCP Active Snare Pad was, in fact, a rebranded product made by the Chinese company HUN, I decided to go to the source and see what else they made.
Along with the M-12 pad (which is being rebranded and sold under RCP, Salyers and perhaps other company names), I found this beefier U-12 pad.

I ordered the U-12 pad through their distributor, Alibaba. It took about 2 1/2 weeks to arrive from China. (Compare that to Xymox, which continues to fail at delivery of their products.)


Here’s my preliminary review.

Here are some additional photos of the pad and its packaging and features

The U-12 has all the same features as the M-12 up top, including adjustable snare sound and a heavy-duty plastic rim that seems able to handle rim shots without breaking down.
It also has the "floating" feature of a second platform underneath.
At a weight of nearly ten pounds, I have to define "float" as a lack of firm, stable attachment, rather than as an issue connected to "lightness". The "Float" feature does seem to allow for slightly greater resonance and viberation when the bottom platform sits on a table top or on a snare stand that is NOT tightened down (tightening the pad into the stand prevents the top platform from moving freely and eliminates the "float").

The pad came in this bag, which is the SAME bag that RCP sells at their site for around $25.
It's a nice bag, but because the pad is so heavy I'm not likely to want to travel with it; I can use the bag to carry other, lighter pads and books and sticks.

Total cost for the pad and bag was $110.
Is it worth that much?
Well, if you've been waiting for a Xymox pad, which is priced similarly and supposedly comes from somewhere in the US, maybe it is.
But in the greater scheme of things, the HUN pad probably cost less than half of its retail price to make in China. So now I must wrestle with questions of labor, carbon footprint and use of resources (the pad is made mostly of wood and plastic), which raises uncomfortable questions for me as a consumer and human being in 2021.

I don't have easy answers. The difficult answers have a lot to do with consumer-based economies of scale, global shipping, and cheapened labor in the interests of a bottom line.
Of course, on my darkest days, I can say the same thing about the entire Marching Arts activity because of the shocking levels of waste found in it. But that is another discussion altogether, and one I will continue to wrestle with.

Someone from HUN has reached out to me on Facebook. Perhaps we’ll communicate at length. Stay tuned.

Note: I purchased this pad on my own dime and was not paid to review it. 

For more info about the HUN U-12 pad, go to Alibaba.com and type “HUN U-12 drum practice pad” in the Search bar.