Review: Rado DiaMaster Grande Seconde

Not every watch has to be revolutionary, ground-breaking or earth-shattering. Some watches are just cool, quirky—copyright Doug DeMuro, 2013—interesting—and the DiaMaster Grande Seconde from Rado is one of them. Here’s why.

It’s Reasonably Affordable

Let’s be real—if your watch money is most people’s house money, buying a cool, quirky, interesting watch is not a difficult task. This is the domain of your Urwerks, your MB&Fs, your De Bethunes, and the only thing that stands in the way of us mere mortals in the act of purchasing them—the astronomic price—wouldn’t be an issue to you.

But for everyone else, for those of us who would think long and hard about wearing a mortgage payment around our wrists, who would love and hate the joy of ownership and financial burden of a more expensive piece, the Rado DiaMaster is about as interesting as a watch gets for a sensible price without just being, well—tacky.

It’s so easy to wish we had more to spend, but budgets are budgets, and for the amount a Rado DiaMaster will set you back, the list of watches that scratch that offbeat itch isn’t looking too healthy. You’re not going to settle for a Fossil watch or something like that, so here we are.

Rado was founded in 1917, Lengnau, Switzerland

It’s a standout look dressed in space-age materials that, were it to say, oh I don’t know, “Hublot” on the dial instead, would probably have another zero on the price. When cheaper prices mean lower margins mean higher volume sales, the standard approach is to make something with a catchall appeal, a word here that has been used to mean “boring”. Sometimes boring is just boring.

But as well as not being boring, the DiaMaster’s not cheap either, you know, plasticky and toy-like. It’s a solid, well-built thing, and its price is enough to know that it is reassuringly so, without making your wallet wince when the time comes to pay. Is it the best thing you could put your money into? Not really. A Tudor Heritage Black Bay is probably a better choice. It’s not anywhere near as interesting though, and we’re here because we don’t want boring, remember?

It’s Made Of Ceramic

One of the reasons that stops the DiaMaster being either tacky or boring, is the use of ceramic in the case. Not as a bezel insert or something lame like that—this is a full ceramic case, or what Rado calls “Plasma high-tech ceramic.” Yikes, that’s flying dangerously close to the sun there, if the sun was where things went to become tacky.

If you want to cringe a bit more, Rado itself refers to plasma high-tech ceramic as—and capitalised no less—Modern Alchemy. Hmm. Well, as vomit-inducing as that marketing spin on the material is, it’s actually a rather fascinating product. You’re probably familiar with how ceramic watches look, matte or polished, and it’s usually a fairly uniform colour.

This DiaMaster has more of a metallic sheen, which you would sensibly assume is because Rado has added metal to the mix, but no, it has not. Just to be clear, there’s no alchemy going on either, rather a finishing process to white ceramic that involves blasting the surface with gases at insanely high temperatures—that’ll be the plasma—to heat it to over 900 degrees Celsius, transforming it into this metallic finish.

Rado started off as The Schlup & Co., a watchmaking factory founded by the three Schlup brothers: Ernst, Werner and Fritz. At the end of the second world war, the factory was one of the world’s biggest watch movement producers

Plasma, in case you were wondering—of course you were—is most certainly not alchemy, rather a gas consisting of atoms that have had some of their electrons removed, creating ions. To artificially produce plasma, you need heat somewhere in the region of 20,000 degrees, and once you have it, it becomes highly reactive with ions of the opposite charge—like in the white ceramic. It’s the same reaction that gives natural gemstones their varying colour.

Ok, so maybe it, kind of, sort of, is a bit like alchemy. It’s not, but it’s certainly way more interesting than your garden variety ceramic, and it elevates this watch to a level of interest and enjoyment above something like that Tudor we mentioned earlier. Just don’t drop it …

It Looks Like An A. Lange & Söhne

Right, so elephant in the room: this looks quite a bit like an A. Lange & Söhne, and that’s a good thing. It also looks a bit like an Arnold & Son and a Jaquet Droz, and that’s a list of brands you most likely won’t ever be considering if the DiaMaster is the peak of your budget.

The Grande Seconde design—that is, the prominence of the seconds sub-dial—is actually more a calling card of Jacquet Droz than any of those other brands listed, a mark of a watch dedicated to pinpoint accuracy and no mistake, thanks to the inability to miss the most precise display found on a watch, the seconds.

With Rado listing the movement quite simply as “automatic” and with it also quite clearly being of ETA origin, it won’t be winning any prizes for its outright accuracy, but the style does lend itself to the otherwise unusual nature of the DiaMaster’s construction.

Rado is owned by The Swatch Group

The dominance of the seconds sub-dial doesn’t go full Jacquet Droz, but it’s large enough to give the main display some grief, opening up a wealth of space top and bottom that’s left to breathe either side of the 43mm case. It’s crisp and fresh without being weird for weird’s sake, seeking inspiration from the annals of time, yet offering a modern, architectural alternative to our everyman Tudor.

There’s nothing about it that looks outrageous or outlandish by any stretch, and like its much more expensive comparators, it uses the space to pleasing effect without somehow spoiling the proportions like so many cheaper alternatives to more expensive watches have a habit of doing. I will say this though: could have done without the date …

It’s no A. Lange & Söhne but it was never going to be. What it is, however, is an alternative with a bit more soul and personality than the default choice. I can see why the Tudor would make the sale ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and I would probably count myself in that group, but I don’t know—catch me at the right time, in the right mood, and the Rado DiaMaster just might be the watch that takes my fancy.

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