Well that's just a matter of taste.
To me it's prolly like this:
Virgil Donati
Marco Minnemann
Mike Mangini
Thomas Lang
Peter Wildoer
Derek Roddy
Aquiles Priester
Mine would be
Virgil Donati
Marco Minnemann
Thomas Lang
Peter Wildoer
Mike Mangini
Derek Roddy
Aquiles Priester
Let me take a stab at this
.
Donati's probably the most technically versatile of all of them, Mangini has the speed records, and Lang is phenomenal as well, so those are probably the top 3, followed shortly by Roddy, who's a speed monster himself. Marco would probably come next, then Wildoer, then Priester.
But there really isn't much of a gap overall, since they're all so unbelievable. I mean, from a pure speed perspective, imagine if these guys could all top out doing rolls at somewhere between 220 and 250 BPM (just random numbers I made up for this example). There might be a definite hierarchy (like one guy might be able to do 250, but another just 220) but you wouldn't really know it unless you paid very close attention to the exact speeds, and it's not like that would get displayed very often anyway--it's not like many bands throw in a ton of drum solos, and outside of extreme metal genres, there aren't even ridiculously fast rolls all that often. Plus, even if you did hear one guy do 250 and another just 220, it doesn't mean the second guy
couldn't do 250.
That's what bugs me about all the hate for Priester, actually. It's as if people assume he can't play certain things just because he hasn't played them in his career. That's like concluding JLB doesn't have above-average vocal range based on his last few albums, or something. Really, except for the extreme metal drummers (Marco, Wildoer, and Roddy), these guys don't push themselves to their limits that often. Mangini I guess did for the world records though. But they're all plenty technical.
I'd go on, but I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll stop
.