Aria
this the Aria.
SPECS
Dia 57mm
Width 46mm
Weight 68.1g
Material titanium
Shortly after the release of the Ari in February 2022, we began dreaming up concepts that would be fitting for an Ari Pro. This began early with talks with Evgeniy getting his Ari – incidentally his first Atmos design – he loved the feel, the width, and the light but powerful play of the Ari, but also mentioned he desired a bit more mass. We started sketching up a few concepts, and had a few in queue while we focused our developmental attentions to other projects in our pipeline, such as the Abel and Snowberry.
We returned to the concept shortly after, armed with feedback from Ari users. The Ari is and has always been a tinkerer’s model; it has a very light base weight, and was designed to accept One Drop Side Effects, Freehand-sized caps, and even rubber o-rings, which allowed a user to construct his own build, up to north of 70g. The only drawback with adding more moving parts on a precision design was that tuning became a necessity.
In our view, tuning isn’t something to be avoided – its a useful skill in yoyoing, similar to being able to correct string tension. It’s easy, and frees one up to enjoy SE-enabled yoyos without unnecessary frustration.
But the larger point for those who had played the Ari was that there was desire for a version unencumbered by the need to customize, assemble, and calibrate. There were calls for a high performing design in the format of the Ari, but even further simplified. Players loved the Ari’s physique, the full-frame form factor, and our use of titanium; but they were requesting play-readiness, and a sharper focus on high performance. That felt aligned to the Pro designation we were thinking about for the next iteration of the Ari form factor.
This brought us back to our conversations with Evegeniy about weight, and after some back and forth, we decided to move into the realm of heavier concepts.
We’ve generally kept our designs below 65g. One design that has broken that soft rule is the Snowberry, oddly enough our heaviest design to date, which clocks in at 65.6g. We’ve mostly been able to do creative things with width and weight distribution in achieving light power without piling on the pounds – case in point, the Snowberry, which is also arguably our fluffiest design in our lineup. For our design purposes the 62-64g space mostly suits us well.
But with this overt dip into heavyweight territory, what we were hoping to achieve in playfeel was akin to the handling and feel of performance cars with low ground clearing – that of torque, gravitas, balance, and the ability to turn tight corners at speed with supreme handling and full, fine control.
68g can sound extreme to some, given there are 66g designs that play sluggishly. The playfeel that players dread is the thudding rock on the end of a string that resists all types of movement. With the Aria, the idea was to design something with considerable mass but distribute it well enough across the Ari’s large 57mm and 48mm frame, so that it would feel substantial and balanced, but not unwieldy and reluctant.
This was one of the earlier prototypes we made of the Aria, machined on aluminum stock for feasibility testing – it had a stepped hub and an even more pronounced nub. We made multiple early prototypes, but they were all condemned by vibe and never made it past testing phases; the weight distribution was too extreme.
Eventually we simplified the wall design, and reduced the overall width from 48mm to 46mm – which, interestingly, makes the Aria our narrowest design to date.
The Aria also has significantly thicker rims than the Ari, giving it a lot more power. Crucially, we graduated the mass bias from the center to the outer rims, which gives the Aria a powerful, but very smooth acceleration and handle.
The Aria is deceptively deft and nimble for a 68g yoyo; it has that low-center-of-gravity smoothness, superb control and pace, and a powerful stability. It’s difficult to throw it off kilter. It stops on a dime. Once it gets moving, it plays lighter than 68g might suggest it would, and has all the spin you need – and then some more, and then some more… and then some more.
It’s everything we were hoping to achieve in an Ari Pro.
The Aria comes equipped with premier kit in Black Stratos Pads, Atmos Type I Concave Bearings, and Zipline Strings’ Case Study #50s.
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december 2022
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