A Unique Drum Set -The Peavey Radial 1000

Important: please use headphones or a good speaker system to get the best idea of what these drums sound like in the room. A phone or laptop is not a good sound barometer.
There are only 2 mics being used (besides my speaking mic) and there is no compression or other processing added.
What you hear is the sound of the drums in my large recording room.
The drums are recorded from the players perspective.

Here is a video demonstration of the Peavey RBS 1 (Radial 1000 drums) from the 1990's. These drums never caught on and were discontinued in 2002.
They could have failed to gain popularity because they look a bit strange, and the price point was high. I have to say though that this is one of the best sounding drum kits I have ever played on, and I have played on hundreds of kits throughout my career
. These drums were invented by Steven Volpp and Peavey brought them to market in the early 1990's. The concept is based on a floating shell with no hardware attached. This opens up the sound of the drums and in my opinion adds more volume and sustain. They are also very easy to tune and have a huge tuning range. I really like the way they sound tuned lower, and I am using a lower tuning in this video.

This floating shell concept has been used before, the most obvious example being the Pearl Free Floaters as well as many high-end timpani designs and I talk about this in the video.
I finally found a set of these that were an early version, and they are in great shape. I feel like the earlier versions of these sets were made under stricter quality control. You can tell the earlier drums by the badges which are screwed on instead of a stick-on design used in later incarnations.

For me personally these are spectacular drums for playing heavier genres like Rock, Metal, etc. The bass drum has a ridiculous low end, and the toms are punchy and have great sustain. I talk about the reasons why the drums sound great in the video and I do an extended demonstration.

At the time this video was made I did not have the snare drum for this kit.
I have both the 13" and 14" now and you can see them here.
14"    • The Peavey Radial 1000 Snare Drum  
13"    • The Rare Peavey Radial 1000 13-inch S...  

The shell for the Peavey snare drums is much thicker than the kit drums and is a stave construction.
In this video I am using a 1990's Tama Starclassic 14"x 6.5" maple snare.
If you want to skip to the playing part of the video here are the time stamps:
Time Stamps
0:00 Intro and discussion
12:37 Full Kit Discussion
16:50 Full Kit Demo

Mics are an AKG C24 stereo overhead and a Shure Beta 52 on the Bass Drum.