Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Vintage Simmons Drums (UK) Users Group

Hello, all:

I recently got my hands on an SDSV, and I have a few questions.
First off, I realize that this thing is pretty old and well used, as
well as being an analogue unit. It also has presumably been converted
from 240v to 115v, or whatever it is in the US. To be honest, I
haven't opened the thing up to check, but it seems to operate on my
house current. I also think the power switch has been replaced.

At any rate, should the "factory" sound for the snare really be kind
of lame sounding? It basically sounds like you're beating on a steel
washtub, and has a pretty abrupt decay, and very little character at
all. As a matter of fact, I can get this same sound on the other
channels by turning the noise balance controls far anti-clockwise. It
seems to me that the noise shouldn't have much tone to it, but more of
a white noise sound.

The kick and tom modules sound pretty decent otherwise. It's really
the snare module that seems to be a problem. I've spent a fair amount
of time twiddling knobs and so forth on this thing, but I think
there's something amiss here.

By the way, is there any obvious way to distinguish between the three
tom modules? I see a small label on each circuit board, but other than
what looks like "tom," "syn," "L," and "R," (left and right?), not
much else besides listening to each module and making kind of an
arbitrary choice as to which is which.

Sorry for the length of this post!

Regards,
Jim Stewart