Hands-On: The A. Lange & Söhne Cabaret Tourbillon In Honeygold
Niche Lange collectors, rejoice! The Cabaret is back! Well, sort of. Today, on this fine Saturday, Lange has brought back the Cabaret in its complicated form, with a 50-piece run of the Cabaret Tourbillon in the brand's proprietary Honeygold alloy. It is a hefty block of grey and Honeygold, with this rectangular silhouette making its first appearance after a 30-piece handwerskskunst run in 2021. The price point, like many of the past Cabaret Tourbillon editions, sits in the mid-six-figure range at around €300,000. When the Cabaret Tourbillon was first introduced to the world in 2008, it was quite horologically impressive, adding the world's first hacking tourbillon into the brand's rectangular design from 1997. It might sound quite surprising that a hacking tourbillon had not been produced until 2008, but being able to stop such a large mass like a tourbillon cage is certainly not an easy feat, especially when you require delicate parts to do so, and with the need to navigate around the tourbillon cage itself. After all, you'd need to be able to stop the cage at any orientation it's in, and at any point in the balance wheel's oscillation. So Lange's movement designers set to work and devised a V-shaped spring that would directly halt the balance wheel—not the tourbillon cage. Its V-shape, centered around a rotating pivot at the end of a lever, would mean that one side would make contact with the balance wheel or tourbillon cage post, and pivot the other side of the V i...