Twenty-eight years ago Remo Belli introduced the plastic drum head and earned himself the undying gratitude of the bovine world.

Now he's come up with some more ideas which, he believes, will earn similar admiration from drummers.

Number one is the Acousticon shell. Basically, this is 19 laminations of wood fibre stuck together with resin and then impregnated with another resin; the result is a light, durable and moisture-proof shell.

Stuck on that is a new drum covering called Quadura; this is a sandwich of polyester with a pigmented vinyl filling determining the colour of the finished drum. It's supposed to be tough and wrinkle-free and there are a lot of colours available; white, black and grey come as standard and blue, deep red, chrome and gold are available on order.

Last but by no means least is a very handy little device called PowerSnap which is designed to make changing your drum heads dead easy.

To describe this I'll need your co-operation. Picture, if you will, a drum. Now you see the blocks around the side where the tension bolts screw in? Well, imagine that you snap those blocks away from the shell (a bit like the clasps on a flightcase) leaving the bolts hanging free so you can just lift the head away.

That's PowerSnap. What's more, once you've replaced the head and snapped all the blocks shut you can adjust the tuning with your key, spanner or teeth in the usual way.

The Encore series kit features all of these innovations.

The basic kit is a five-drum outfit costing £499, and the 500 series hardware, for an extra £220, includes a snare stand, hi-hat stand, boom stand, straight cymbal stand and bass drum pedal.

For about £30 more than the basic kit there are also special Designer sets which come as standard covered in white with black accent bands, and can be ordered in other colour combinations.

What you get, size-wise, is a 16"x22" bass drum, 11"x12" and 12"x13" mounted toms, a 16"x16" floor tom and a 14"x8" snare.

Most of the fittings are pretty standard, if respectable. As for the toms, what can I say? Can I compare them to a summers day? No, not really. Apart from all the revolutionary innovations, they look just like your archetypal tom tom.

And so to the snare drum. Chromed steel, nice and deep, um... er...

The most notable thing about the snare (visually) is the stand upon which it proudly sits. Like all the stands, this features a quick-release mechanism for height adjustment. You pull a lever away from the stand and the clamp is instantly loose, allowing you to adjust the stand without having to unscrew anything; just like the system used on racing bicycle wheels.

The stand goes extremely low, allowing the more shy, retiring drummer (is there such a thing?) to actually hide behind the tom toms.

The tubing on all the stands is very chunky and all the legs have big, rubber feet; the hi-hat and two cymbal stands are hefty, and the counterweight on the boom one looks like something a Tottenham fan once threw at me. It's big, heavy, solid and it hurts when it hits you on the elbow.

The bass drum pedal also has a flick-type lever clamp to clip it onto the drum; simplicity itself.

With this kit, Remo have come up with just about everything for your convenience in setting it up. I can see it all now. Hordes of hairy drum roadies crowded into the Record Breakers studio, all endeavouring to change the heads on a 12 piece drumkit in less than 10 seconds. Well it's not as daft as sitting in a bath of custard for a week.

But I digress. Now you have the kit set up in your mind, let me tell you what it sounds like. The bass drum goes 'thud', the toms go 'boom', the snare goes 'dack' and the hardware goes 'denk' but you're not supposed to hit that.

OK. So that's not very helpful, but you just try describing the sound of a drum kit and you'll realise that my carefully chosen words are just about as accurate as you can get.

However, one quality which the written word can convey is loudness. These drums are loud, wonderfully loud, mind-bogglingly loud. I could have sat there all day sending messages to the folks back in Swaziland but I had a review to write.

What Remo have come up with here is a kit to be reckoned with. The convenience coupled with the robust hardware, the smart shells and, of course, the Remo heads give the Encore an overall class in the realm of the high-priced Sonors and Yamahas so at around £700 it's got to be worth a look.