Dream 20″ Contact 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. The Dream 20″ Contact Crash/Ride Cymbal is the subject of the current review. Compared to the 20″ Dream Bliss Crash/Ride Cymbal that we reviewed recently, the Contact has a higher pitch, and is, therefore, more penetrating.

It rides beautifully, responding to the stick with a good bounce, and the crash is fast and intense. The bell has a very nice ring to it as well.

The spectrum of the crash has large peaks at 130 Hz, 350 Hz, 1.6 kHz, 1.8 kHz, 3.3 kHz, 3.8 kHz, and 5.9 kHz, before declining to 60 kHz.

The ping spectrum, like the Dream Bliss, has a flatter response than the crash, with the majority of the sound within 300 Hz – 15 kHz. Because of this flat response, the ping is very neutral, and not overly bright.

The crash has a peak at 0.20 seconds, with a long sustain.

The ping attack is very fast, and it declines quickly, which can also be seen by comparing the spectra of the crash and the ping. Notice that the higher frequencies of the ping, in the spectrum, have declined more at the end of 2 seconds (the purple line) than they did in the crash. For example, at 10 kHz, the distance between the yellow line (the initial attack) and 2 seconds later (the purple line) is greater in the ping spectrum than in the crash spectrum.

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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