Cowbell Cowboy

Hi all,
I'm in the market for a metal snare for playing live.
Although I am a wooden snare lover at heart and prefer the depth and warmth of wood for recording, it has occurred to me at recent gigs that my Tama Artwood Maple (14"x6.5"), although sounding great, is not cutting through with as much punch as I'm after. So I was thinking possibly a metal snare might be the thing for gigging with my current rock band.
The sound I'm aiming for is the enhanced attack and cutting power of a metal shell with plenty of impact, however I'd prefer to keep away from ringy snares as I'm really not a lover of twangy, cold metallic ringiness. Is it possible to get warm-sounding metal snares?
Budget is £200-£250. I could probably stretch a little further towards £300 but would prefer to spend closer to £230 as a target.
What are your suggestions?
Note that if there are any wooden snares that might give me what I'm after as a live snare, feel free to suggest those as well as I'm open to alternatives.

Cheers,

CC

Hi all, long time.

I'm in the market for a new set of decent all-purpose headphones to use for general listening, electronic kit practising and production work, ideally within the £50 range.

For years I have been using Samson Hr300s which sound great and have excellent response and clarity for a relatively low-cost set of headphones, but these now need replacing and I'm interested to see what else might offer similar quality for around £50 as a budget.

I'm after proper headphones rather than in-ear earpieces, something with good response and clarity. As mentioned before I'm using them for production and mixdown as well as general listening, so really aiming to avoid muddy sounding phones.

Any recommendations?

I'm after the names of some drum machines and/or synths used in early-to-mid 90s house music.
It would be excellent if someone could post the model name, an example of a record it was used on, and if possible, an estimate of how easy/difficult the model would be to programme from a non-visual approach. The latter is fairly important as I am blind, I'm in the market for one of these for making house music and I wouldn't really want to end up with something that would be impossible to learn to programme through memorising keystrokes.

Cheers,

CC