A deadbeat seconds watch lives or dies by one hand. The hand jumps once per second, in clean steps, and it is the entire point of the watch. Until now, the owner of an Arnold & Son DSTB could watch that hand tick with total precision and still not set the watch to the exact second. The new DSTB Stop-Seconds fixes that.
Arnold & Son introduced the watch in the run-up to WatchTime New York, and Hodinkee’s hands-on makes the case that the update is mechanical, not cosmetic. Pull the crown and the seconds hand stops. For most watches that is a footnote. For a watch whose complication is the seconds hand, it closes the one gap in the design.
What DSTB Means
DSTB stands for Dial-Side True Beat. The deadbeat mechanism sits on the front of the watch, isolated from the rest of the movement, its bridges, gears, and release lever spread across the dial between nine and twelve o’clock. It takes the smooth beat of the caliber and converts it into pulses, one per second, for the oversized seconds hand. A railroad track printed in blue carries the seconds around the top of the dial.
The lever at the center of the mechanism is shaped like an anchor, the house emblem and a reference to John Arnold, the eighteenth-century English watchmaker whose marine chronometers are the brand’s founding claim. Arnold & Son is Swiss with English roots, part of the Citizen Group’s prestige holdings and led by Pascal Béchu.
The Two Editions
There are two versions, each limited to 18 pieces. The Cliff Grey edition pairs a 5N red gold case with a light grey grained dial. The Kingsand edition is platinum with a pale gold dial. The grained surfaces are colored by PVD coating and catch the light hard, though Hodinkee reports legibility survives it.
Hours and minutes sit on an offset subdial near five o’clock, cut from white opal. The subdial is now concave, sunk toward the base of the dial so the printed Roman numerals curve with its slope. Earlier DSTB models used a flat opal dial. It is a small change you register with your thumb as much as your eye.
On the Wrist
It wears large, as every DSTB has. The dial is expansive and the bezel thin, so the 42mm case presents bigger than it measures. Hodinkee counts that a virtue here rather than a fault: the watch exists to put a jumping seconds mechanism on display, and a smaller case would crowd the machinery that justifies it.
The Numbers
The case is 42mm across and 12.95mm thick, with water resistance of 30 meters. Inside is the in-house automatic A&S6303 caliber, with a 55-hour power reserve, radial Côtes de Genève on the bridges, blued screws, and a guilloché rotor carrying the anchor. The red gold watch is priced at $58,700 and the platinum at $72,500. Hodinkee puts the increase over the outgoing models at a little over a thousand dollars in each metal, a modest charge for two real changes.
Thirty-six watches in total, then, for a complication most brands leave alone. If you want one, the decision is simple: grey dial or gold, and be quick about it.
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