Re: That's not a drum sampler. This, this is a drum sampler.
Y'know, it occurs to me I haven't poked around its inner workings enough to see if there are additional bleed options that could be enabled or internal levels to be fiddled with a la SD2. It's definitely a resource hog, and that would make it more so, but it could be worth it for that extra push over the cliff. And as you said, some people record realdrums like that anyhow. I'm betting that would get lost in a mix, and there's the possibility I might wind up tweaking hats/OHs/cymbal spots to gain part of that back dependent on context. Could be handy though.
Having seen the gear list for the recording, I suspect someone turned a knob on a 1073 or 1176 or something at some point, but it seems to have been done pretty unobtrusively. I don't hear a compressor going to town here, and the snare punches like a fist. They obviously spent a lot of time on the hats and snare in particular- there's multiple snare articulations with varying degrees of ring; sounds like they're hitting different spots on the head/rim- and the kick timbre doesn't change drastically between hard and medium-hard/medium strength hits, so getting dynamics in there in a credible sounding way is pretty easy.