Overview
A very close sibling of Imperial Burst, Lilac Burst was the less popular option and therefore available for only a short time in the Mapex range. There's not a huge amount in it, especially in low light, but in brighter conditions you can see that Imperial Burst fades to red rather than the purple of Lilac Burst. Personally I have kits in both finishes and unless I put them together I'm struggling to see the difference (see the shot below). That's probably why Mapex discontinued the Lilac version pretty quickly and just ran with the more popular finish.
Anyway, an extremely pretty snare and really very few of these around - I've only ever seen one other. They would have been made specifically to match an Orion Classic kit somewhere between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s; this example came with my personal 6 piece Orion Classic. Although Orions continued to come with matching snares after this, they were branded Orion Series rather than Black Panther, but the difference is really just the badge in my opinion.
