Supernatural 18″ Divine Crash Cymbal

Supernatural Cymbals is one of several small companies that have emerged during the past few years, who are based in Turkey, and who still make cymbals the way they have been made for centuries (except for the electric motor that turns the lathing machine). The cymbals start out as cast bronze discs, which are heated, rolled, cut into the desired diameter for the cymbal, hand hammered, and hand lathed. There is no machining at all. The results are quite distinguishable from machine hammered and lathed cymbals. It is not that one way is better than the other, but rather, you now have several additional choices in sound, and some of them are due to the old world ways of producing them. This review covers the Supernatural 18″ Divine Crash. It has a very fast response, and somewhat higher pitch than the Supernatural Universal Crash Cymbal we reviewed a few weeks ago. It is not suited for riding the body of the cymbal, but the bell rides well.

The close-up photo, shown below, illustrates the unique lathing pattern. The bell and two rings close to the bell are unlathed, and the rest of the cymbal has fine, closely spaced lathing lines. Hammering is deep, with small round hammer marks.

The spectral analysis has strong peaks at 260 Hz, 600 Hz, 2.9 kHz, 3.8 kHz and then a slow decline out to 50 kHz.

The peak of the response is at 0.015 seconds, with a moderately fast decay.

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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