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Moving from meeting to meeting at Geneva Watch Days, it’s easy to get lost in the opulent, luxurious novelties. But when you meet with Armin Strom, you’re brought back to a kind of pure watch nerdery that transcends the luxurious surroundings of shows like this. Armin Strom, even while producing watches that I think are objectively great looking, is all about mechanical innovation. There isn’t a watch in their collection that doesn’t have a novel mechanical trick up its sleeve. The Gravity Equal Force that Zach looked at recently is a great example. It has all the aesthetic and design trappings of what we think of as today’s modern high end indie watchmaking, but the real appeal lies in the watchmaking itself. It’s an important distinction that most enthusiasts understand intrinsically – some watches and brands just have a laser focus on engineering, and that’s sort of what sets Armin Strom apart.
The brand’s big Geneva Watch Days release is, simply put, a showstopper, and perhaps the most fascinating watch of the week. It’s certainly a significant horological accomplishment. The Dual Time GMT Resonance First Edition takes Armin Strom’s already unique take on the resonance concept and shrinks it down to an almost impossible to believe size in a watch that takes a completely novel approach to timekeeping and provides a great deal of practical functionality to make it downright approachable. It also just happens to be a stunning piece of horological art in motion, purely a result of the engineering and mechanical ingenuity at work.
Before we get into the watch itself, it’s probably a good idea to wrap our arms around the idea of resonance in a mechanical watch movement. The easiest way to understand a resonance equipped movement is to observe that it effectively uses two regulating organs linked together to regulate one another through the natural movement of their balance wheels. The idea is that the balance wheels will naturally synchronize, each regulating the other, and providing stability in timekeeping that outpaces traditional regulation and movements that use some type of constant force mechanism.
Very few brands work in this space. F.P. Journe is famously another, but Armin Strom’s resonance system sets itself apart in the way it links the two balance wheels. Other watchmakers rely on existing movement components (such as the mainplate) to transmit vibrations between each balance wheel, but Armin Strom’s resonance calibers incorporate a “clutch spring” suspension system to directly link the two balances. You can see this clutch spring in action on the Dual Time GMT Resonance and other Armin Strom watches that use the resonance principle. Seeing the spring pulse along with the balance is one of the strange pleasures of these watches – there’s nothing else quite like it in watchmaking, and when you observe its size (it is so thin) you begin to realize the technical achievement in getting a movement like this to even function.
Prior to the Dual Time GMT Resonance First Edition, the most advanced resonance pieces in Armin Strom’s collection existed under the “Masterpiece” banner. These are largely experimental watches in bold, oversized oval cases, allowing dual time functionality (with two dials and two complete movements) as opposed to Armin Strom’s “Pure Resonance” and “Mirrored Force Resonance” collections, whose movements integrate multiple balances into a single caliber. The Masterpiece watches, which Armin Strom had a few examples of in their suite at Geneva Watch Days, measure approximately 59mm x 43.4mm and are nearly 16mm thick. They’re enormous. But they have the ability to track two time zones on two dials, each of which can be independently set while keeping the caliber in a state of resonance.
The great innovation of the Dual Time GMT Resonance First Edition is that Armin Strom has managed to effectively squeeze all of the functionality of the Masterpiece watches into a case that actually wears like a normal watch. It measures just 39mm in diameter and 9mm tall. The watch is powered by the ARF22 in-house caliber, which makes use of two independent but symmetrically mirrored oscillators. It’s a manually wound movement with two barrels and two separate gear trains for each of the off-set time displays. Each display is set independently via a dedicated crown on either side of the white gold case.
Handling the watch, you’re immediately aware of the constant motion inherent in its operation, which is very much intentional on the part of Armin Strom. Exposing their mechanical innovations is part of the brand ethos, but it’s not done in a flashy way. It feels more like an act of transparency, as if to say we have nothing to hide, this how we’ve solved a particular horological problem. Resonance watches have an almost mystical quality about them – there’s a real “trust us” energy behind a watch like this, but Armin Strom earns that trust through the prominent display of the clutch spring. It’s almost hypnotizing to see it in action.
The Dual Time GMT Resonance First Edition of 25 pieces, and carries a retail price of $120,700. Armin Strom
