Metal Pads

I'll give you the same advice I give everyone who asks about metal pads on eBay.

STAY AWAY!!!!

Metal pads do not equal a quality dance pad. Particularly on eBay, where 99% of the pads being sold (particularly if you're looking for a deal) are shoddy, poorly constructed knockoffs that someone found in bulk on alibaba.com. You will get much better play-life out of a normal soft pad with modding for about half the $85.

There have been some who have come here and ignored my advice. One of them even paid me some money to try and repair his metal pad when it died less than a month after he got it. I have since gotten over that particular bout of insanity, and don't do repair work anymore.

In my experience, there are two brands of Metal pad that are worth the investment, the Red Octane Afterburner, and the Cobalt Flux. Start socking away $20/month now and before long you'll have plenty to get a quality dance pad that will last.

Sorry if I seem a bit harsh on this topic, but it's a bit of a crusade/passion of mine to keep people away from the trash that's being sold on eBay.

If you're going for homebuilt, here's some links I've found to help.

www.geocities.com/ddrhomepad/
home.comcast.net/~stoli16/ddr/
www.digitaltorque.com/mydancepad/
http://www.DON'TBUYPADSONEBAY.com
www.ddrfreak.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=7839402&highlight=arrow#7839402 (last one's more of a bunch of graphics)



I decided to go with a homebuilt pad after going through 2 crappy Ignition 3.0's (One died in 8 months, the other in 1 month) and seeing the heavy price tag on some of the better pads. I'll re-emphazise this throughout my post, even though it's been said 50 times by now... DON'T BUY PADS ON EBAY

Of course, being the klutz I am (how I don't end up in the ER for playing DDR, I don't know), am the last person in the house that should be handling delicate work like pad wiring, so I left it to my dad...



SO TRUE.

My dad, however seems to disagree though. I would have had a home built His schedule is otherwise filled with such urgent and important activities as:

(Subliminal message...DON'T BUY PADS ON EBAY )

- Reading Scientific American on the couch til he falls asleep (by tommorow he doesn't remember anything he read)

- Looking up pointless facts about whatever. (I know more than I ever knew about turnips thanks to this)

And yet he still insists that he just hasn't had time to work on it... It should have been done 3 months ago.


Anyway, moral of the story... There are always pointless daily activities you do that can be cut out. You DO have enough time, you're just wasting it without thinking about it. Other moral of the story?

DON'T BUY PADS ON EBAY