Dream 20″ Bliss Crash/Ride Cymbal

Dream Cymbals is one of the new companies whose products are manufactured in China. From what we are told, the cymbals are totally hammered and lathed by hand, directly from the cast bronze disc, rather than put through rollers to flatten them before hammering. If that is accurate, I don’t think I would want to get into a fight with any of the cymbal smiths, because it must take enormous strength and endurance to perform this task from the raw cast ingot. However, the sound is very revealing, and suggests that it is so. The cymbals have a very strong wash that sustains. Dream has a Bliss 20″ Thin Ride and a Bliss 20″ Ride, so this cymbal, the Bliss 20″ Crash/Ride is a medium thin weight in between the other two. It crashes loud and the sustain is long. Sticking delivers a ping that is just above the wash, so it would make a good jazz cymbal. The bell has a nice ring to it. The overall sound quality is exceptional for a cymbal with a street price of only $144. This represents tremendous value. I expect more good things to come from this new company.

First, the spectral analysis of the crash. Major peaks occur at 400 Hz and 2.5 kHz – 3.8 kHz, then declining slowly to 55 kHz.

The ping spectrum is shown below. It has a flatter response than the crash, with major peaks at 320 Hz, 3.6 kHz, and 5.3 kHz. The response is flat out to 15 kHz, then attenuates rapidly before another lower peak at 24 kHz, trailing off to 35 kHz.

The crash has a peak at 0.18 seconds, with a long sustain.

Notice the long sustain for the ping. This is characteristic of hand hammering.

Click HERE to listen to an audio sample, which will include crash (when appropriate), ride, and bell sounds (these are 24 bit, 176.4 kHz wav files, so be sure your sound card is capable of handling these high resolution sound files).

If your sound card cannot play the high resolution file, click HERE to listen to an MP3 sound file.

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