I bought this along with the smaller 17" Extreme metal crash to replace some old cracked crashes and record some music with my band. I was very pleased with both the sound, and the look of the cymbals.
There is a loud, dark wash from this 18" cymbal which is great for filling chorus' in heavy distorted music (I think some people call it Crash/Riding??!!), while crashing the accents on the smaller 17" gives a nice bright contrast to this.
The bells on both cymbals have a nice interesting sound, at times I thought they might be little dull, flat, or cheap sounding, but there are paper barcode labels attached underneath so I should really remove those before I comment further!
The 17 and 18 are very well matched tonally so I'd imagine other cymbals in the range might compliment these quite well.
Absolutely no signs of ever developing cracks, and I have these nearly a year already!
Overall, a huge, ear splittingly loud cymbal with a pretty full wash and nice dark tones!