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Thread: Drum box or... this?

Yes, I definitely checked out all of the multipads. I'm not working much with loops for drums, but plan to use some of those features for vocal samples (all processed through the rack). The Nord Drum looks cool, but I wasn't looking for synthesized drums as I can do a lot of that sound design in my rack or with the DFAM. The 32GB of memory in the Alesis was one of the selling points for me over the older Roland, though I see that Roland have just announced an updated SPD that looks strikingly like the Alesis with almost the exact same features (for more $, of course).
I'm not a drummer either, and believe it or not I'm not a huge fan of samplers, but it's great to have the ability to have that physical/human approach to rhythm in a largely robotic/sequenced system. As I mentioned, I was getting frustrated with the lack of nuance and dynamics in the modular drums that I had collected. With the velocity layers/multisamples in a decent sampler, that frustration is now gone.
I'm building a hybrid approach with the Alesis. I have MIDI out from one of my drum machines triggering samples from the multipad, so I can still program it in an X0X style without having to play everything via drumsticks, and I'm adding a Mutant Brain MIDI interface to my rack so that I can also trigger events and sequences from the multipad in the traditional way with sticks. It's exactly the approach I was hoping for all along, I just didn't realize that it could be done.
Yes, this approach is expensive too (as all eurorack is). But, the possibilities seem limitless, and I always felt incredibly limited with modular drums. I was able to sell off some of my drum modules to pay for the sampler, and the scope of sounds I have access to is now so much greater for the same amount of expense.
Again, this is just my experience. Your needs are probably much different than mine. I thought a dissenting opinion might be of interest to the conversation. :) The important part is to have fun, and that LXR looks like 100% fun. Just consider what it is you are really hoping to accomplish before you spend your hard earned cash.
Good luck!