Jeff Almeyda
Senior Consultant
I'm with trkdrmr on this one, stretch spring is a step backwards, I'll bet that the action on a ludwig speed king is superior to the demon drive due to string compression. To say that the ninja bearings make it faster than the axis or trick is ludicrous. Come on, Jeff almeyda, senior consutant, your foot doesn't feel bearing fluidity, it feels SPRING TENSION. Sheesh . Anyone who claims that has bought into the hype. Go ahead and google or wiki "ninja bearings". All it is is a brand name of some skateboard company who claims (like every other one on the market) to have produced the most advanced ones on the market. I also have owned this:
which were awesome, and by far called the smoothest here on the internet, but then i upgraded to these:
So i have a personal testimony to back up my performance claims. Simply saying, "these are an order of magnitude greater" is ridiculuos... by an order of magnitude. I can personally testify that my double bass blast beat increased from 204bpm single stroke sixteenths with the DW 9000, which i owned for 2 years, to 216 bpm simply by switching to the Trick. I am definitely going to buy the pearl demon drive for my own satisfaction to put it to the acid test to find out if it truly is the best, and hey, If i'm doing 217 bpm with it, guess what? The Trick's going on ebay.
I'll reserve judgement on the demon until i get my foot on one.
Wow, First off, take your confrontational attitude and shove it bro. Don't call me out by name. You don't exactly sound like you are "reserving judgment".
I never said that the bearings made the pedal faster. I said that the feel was smoother. Re-read my post. The slave pedal on these is more responsive than any other I've ever felt. That does have something to do with a smoother bearing that produces less friction that that used by the competition. So yes, I do feel "bearing fluidity", albeit indirectly. Pearl made no bones about them being taken from skateboards. They actually had skateboard wheels as part of the display at NAMM but you weren't there to see it.
How could you say that I only felt spring tension? How about the fact that the slave pedal has significantly more oscillations than your beloved Tricks? Is that due to spring tension? Obviously not.
I would say that the Tricks were better to me if I felt that way but I don't. I also don't see or feel anything special about the compression spring besides the quick tension adjust. I set it and forget it anyway. Why is the conventional expansion spring a "step backwards"? Force is force, the resistance curves are slightly different but there is no evidence that any one is "better" than any other. The fact that the current speed record was done on an Axis with a "primitive" conventional spring tends to bear me out. Believing that a compression spring is inherently superior now THAT is buying into the hype.
BTW, I have the Tricks, 2 pairs of Axis, A pair of Eliminators and an Offbeat so I speak from experience.
Look, I don't care what you play. I'm actually playing Elim strap drives right now and loving them. Just don't jump down my throat if you don't like what I like.