Elevation Pro is the first product from new Irish company, Ardán Audio
Ardán Audio are a new company, hailing from Dublin, Ireland. Their founder, seasoned audio engineer Brent Smith, recently visited the SOS offices to talk us through Ardán’s first product, the Elevation Pro speaker stand. Designed by Brent and made in Italy, the Elevation Pros have been in development for over two years, and as well as being commendably rugged, they provide a unique degree of speaker decoupling, plus both horizontal and vertical angle adjustment.
The chunky alloy frame sits on top of what Ardán call the IsoBase: a rubber mat with grooves on top, in which lie two sand-filled tubes. The rubber and tubes provide decoupling between the stands and the desk or meter bridge (or wherever the speakers are placed). Moving further up is a dial, which allows the speakers to be tilted either up or down. Monitors can be made to point up to 36 degrees above the horizontal, or 15 degrees below — making them useful for situations where the speakers need to be placed either above or below the engineer’s head, or on angled meter bridges. A large thumbwheel below the dial unlocks the stand’s swivelling action, so that monitors can be turned up to 40 degrees left or right of their central position.
The speakers rest on two metal-alloy arms, where moveable rubber pads make contact with the speakers, isolating them from the stands. It is this twin decoupling — between both the speaker and stand, and the stand and surface — that Ardán Audio say makes the design of the Elevation Pro so effective at improving monitor performance.
Capable of supporting monitors up to 20kg in weight, the Elevation Pros are specified to carry monitors a maximum of 390mm tall, 292mm wide and 332mm deep. Available from eBay and Amazon, they’re selling for €488 per pair, including worldwide shipping and VAT. We’ll be putting them through their paces in an SOS review soon!
Ardan Audio Elevation Pro stands mounted on a meter bridge.
