Second-hand electronic drum kits

[evilpaul]

I'm looking to get my son a new drum kit. I wish I could get him an acoustic but we don't have the space.. so electronic it is. He's currently using a second-hand Alesis DM Lite which has served well but he's outgrown it now. To be honest, he grew out of it quite quickly but we got it cheap and didn't want to pay too much in case he didn't take to the drums. He's quite an aggressive player and it's taken quite a beating.. it's starting to fail now and we want to upgrade.

I'm not wanting to pay much more than £200 if I can help it, and we've been looking at second-hand Alesis Nitro kits as a possibility. They come up on ebay occasionally for that sort of price and in decent condition but we haven't been lucky enough to bag one yet. Often the sellers don't want to post (I can't blame them) and they're too far away for us to collect, so our search is pretty limited.

My question is... are there any other good alternatives that we should be looking at? It seems that manufacturers update and change the names fairly often so it's really hard to get our heads around which are the good kits and which are not. This is especially true in the second-hand market when you could be comparing different generations of kits. I'm not a drummer so I don't really know what I'm looking for. We do know that we're not looking for gadgets or gimmicks - don't need a hundred drum kits, built-in practice patterns or tutor modes. We would like something that can handle cross-stick and where he can choke the cymbals, but I think those features are probably out of our price range.

Any suggestions?