How do you get HSS to actually work?

[LooseSends]

I have two Alesis Crimson2 snares, both have an insane center hotspot.

I've tried adjusting curves and settings until I'm blue in the face but the only thing that makes center strikes not OP is by practically squishing the velocity range entirely, resulting in poor dynamics. Any reasonable hits in the center few inches are amplified exponentially, and adjusting the sensitivity knob just attenuates the whole striking surface making edge hits weak.

I can't think of a better case for hotspot suppression but ironically that's a function that doesn't seem to even register on my ED units. It happens on both practically brand new snares.

I'm not afraid of DIY on them, and have built my own triggers and a hall-sensor retrofit on a HH pedal that works flawlessly, but I feel like messing with the cones is going to open a rather large can of worms I might not be able to recover from. I'll definitely go that way if I had a relatively surefire solution or method but all I really want is to tone down center hits by maybe 30% and I can learn to control my hits better.

Any ideas on why HSS doesn't work in the ED control software (for me)?

20220917_004317668_iOS.jpg (922.12 KiB) Viewed 877 times

20220917_004320810_iOS.jpg (1.08 MiB) Viewed 877 times

Both of these are supposed to be Crimson II snares, so maybe they changed some internals. Either way, both suffer from this hotspot issue.

[Rob]

Hotspot suppression only works with a single cone in the center of the pad. You can probably reduce the amount of hotspotting a bit by adding a 30k resistor in series with the piezo, but the eDRUMin hostspot suppression feature is not compatible with those pads.

[LooseSends]

Ah I see. Thanks for the suggestion!