Remo Encore 18" Ambassador clear BD

For this price, it's not hard to add a back up at home, at the practice booth or taking it along live.

First installed without tuning, it has that Mylar sound to it.

I put this on a 18" Tama Club Jam Vintage bd, with the original Tama resonance skin still at front, upgraded with a 5" porthole and the large Evans cushion inside snug against the batter skin.

When you stuff the kick up, there isn't even much difference with other, more expensive heads.
It's not a tonal wonder, it's just a cheap workhorse, best suited as cheap backup or practice batter.
Especially when the kick is required to be dead anyway.

The China virus lockdown was a perfect period for some tuning experiments.
So after a while, I was able to get a good sound out of this.
I don't like dead kicks, I like them to sing actually
It performs better in mid/low to low range, and with the reso skin always tuned higher than the batter I even managed to reach a slight boom.
Even with the Evans cushions in it.
When I stuff another cushion (the small Evans) in it that touches the reso skin, it becomes more dead for live/recording purposes.

And although it's easier to work with a very muted kicksound and let the triggersounds do the rest of the work, instead of letting triggered kick sounds battle with booming acoustics, I keep it acoustically booming.
Because I like it. And for a gig I'll stuff the boom away.

This skin keeps it tuning wonderfully well.
I reached a sweet spot, measured it with a phone app tuner and it just kept the tune after months and months of playing.
It won't give you those deep pure acoustic sub kicks;
it will give you a very workable sound that will cut trough any mix though..

It's also strong.
I once made a mistake with the shaft of a kick pedal set up scraping against the skin during a few songs at a live gig before I was able to interfere.
It left some deep, worrying vertical scratches on the spot.
Some millimeters material scraped right from the surface.
(again Thomann: I wish we could send in some pictures)

I decided to leave it on and expected it to crack during home use: it didn't.
A while later during a next gig I decided to see what would happen if I used it again and took a spare batter skin along.
But it kept holding it's own.
And we're months later after that, I practice daily for hours on that batter skin, much of the time with an aluminium batter, and it's still there.
That's 5 stars for quality.

Concluding:
Comparing this €15 bd skin against €50 skins I can say that it doesn't sound 3 times worse than the more than 3 times cheaper price difference!
That's why it gets 4 stars for the sound.
The one-ply 10mm skin is very reliable, keeps it tune and ideal for usage with stuffed kicks and tuning experiments.

The 2-ply's are better for controlled sounds, the 1-ply's are better for that jazzy booming.