Footprint – two sizes, 620 x 517mm or 540 x 445mm.
Height – six heights, ranging from 500mm up to 930mm, with anything from two to five levels, depending on choice and spacing.
A separate series, the Grand Solo, offers a lower 445mm height in one or two shelf configurations, the two standard footprints, or a smaller 490mm x 400 footprint that is purpose designed to coincide with the plinth dimensions of the venerable LP12, allowing that turntable to be ‘direct mounted’ atop the legs. Andante Largo even offer a special top cap to facilitate just that, giving users the choice of direct coupling the Philips head screws to the spikes, or retaining the original rubber feet (either option being generally preferable to the much-maligned Trampolin base).
Single level amp-stands with a height of 110mm are available in all three footprints.
Shelf Spacing – Shelves are evenly spaced as standard (the Andante Largo website offers comprehensive measurements and spacing information). However, custom sizes and spacings are available to special order. In addition, longer mounting spikes can be specified, increasing the height of the shelf by 10mm or 20mm, if the extra ‘air’ is considered desirable.
The Rigid Series – As well as the Grand Tower Series, Andante Largo also offers the more affordable Rigid Series. These use 25mm titanium tubing, treated with the same damping materials. The lugs are first cast and then machined, with a simpler, smooth finish, to save on CNC time and cost. They come in two, slightly smaller footprints but a similar range of height and shelf configurations and colour options.
The Whole Enchilada…
Roll all of that together and the exactingly realised and combined parts and materials result in an incredibly stable, rigid, lightweight, continuously coupled and critically damped structure. It exhibits extremely low energy storage and is as light in weight as it’s possible to be, congruent to its function. In terms of the relationship between mass and mechanical properties, it is perhaps most akin to the chassis in a racing car or high-performance airframe. In the case of some of the high-priced, high-mass, high-end alternatives, even a single support platform is perhaps best (or safest) approached as a two-man lift, an entire, four-shelf, Grand Tower rack is pretty much child-portable! Nor is it just that you can pick it up. Like so many things in audio – and just like the best bicycle frames – you can tell a lot about how a product will sound (or ride) just from the feel. While a Grand Tower frame responds to the tap-test with a gentle, dull “fudd”, it still feels light and taut. There’s a difference between damped and dead – and this is it.
The Andante Largo Grand Tower is elegant and beautifully executed, an exactingly engineered, integrated structure in which energy generated in the system’s components sees a single, continuous, lossy path into the damped frame and ultimately, the mechanical ground on which it sits. Each interface is rigid and carefully considered, from both the materials and engineering aspect. But that doesn’t mean that the Andante Largo products are without compromise. As dedicated as they are to audio performance, that Bauhaus-esque insistence on form following function imposes its own, practical limitations.
