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For a while, indeed for as long as I have known of his existence, Ernest Larouche has been saying that the glued-badge Designers sound more open than the screwed badge version. Not having been in the room with him when he came to that conclusion, I can't state either way. I am willing to give credence that he experienced something. But what?
The shells, as far as I know, were no different. The lugs were changed much later in production, and the rims stopped being manufactured by the now mythical and apparently broken seamless-shell-spinning machine long after the badges got screws. No one says the SQs suffer from seamed hoops. Rubber-isolated hardware has been a constant.
For the sake of discussion, let's posit that the earlier drums that Ernest played were indeed more open than some later ones that happened to have badges screwed on. Why? The screws holding the badges can be safely ignored. Seamed hoops on SQs have never been accused of inhibiting the sound, so we can drop that issue. Hardware on the SQ is a little less chunky, perhaps, but the hardware of Designers never changed... except for the design of the lugs.
What happened with the lugs is curious. Somewhere in Designer production, Sonor changed the lug, fixing the receiver in place with two small metal pins introduced through the back of the lug, replacing the previous method that depended upon a length of semi-hard plastic tubing to keep the receiver in position by friction and pressure against the bottom of the receiver.
In order for the pins to work on the new lugs, the receiver had to be enlarged at the bottom to give the pins some material to restrain the receiver. The shape of the enlarged receiver is reflected in the square hole in the new lug, replacing the old round hole. In short, a lot of fiddling around at some expense to fix an unspecified problem.
Some of you - if your eyes have not glazed over yet- will remember the problem I had with my 12x9 tom, whose lugs were so filled with some kind of retaining glue that the receivers couldn't wiggle at all. It had other problems, too, but that's beside the point. The point is that pouring a teaspoon of glue into a lug where the receiver is supposed to move makes no sense.
I took every one of those lugs apart and cleaned out the glue. Since then, I have noticed that the plastic retaining tubes can, and do on occasion, fall out. If the earliest lugs were assembled without glue, I'll bet that Sonor got complaints. And that their solution, until the new lugs were designed four or so years later, was to glue the thing together to stop complaints. Obviously, a lug so glued will not have the necessary flexibility to adapt to changes in angle dictated by a rim and head. As a result, many Designers may have been delivered with distortional tension on the rims and shells. That is bound to frustrate tuning and resonance. My own story: While I could tune my 12" tom (tune the heads to themselves and to each other) before fixing the problem, it never sounded great. It came alive after freeing up the lugs.
Since then, I have tested about thirty 1st series Designer lugs. About half of them had so much glue that the receivers could not wiggle.
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Gregory
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