Bassocontinuo
Factory Tour • November 2023
In November 2023 we flew from London Stansted to Bergamo, Italy for two days to meet the good people behind Bassocontinuo, and to take a peek behind the scenes to witness first-hand some of the production processes behind their fine audio racks.
Founder Lorenzo Belloli (above) collected us at the airport. A man every bit as Italian as his name suggests, we were surprised to see him turn up in a BMW instead of, say, an Alfa Romeo. In hindsight this detail characterises the Bassocontinuo brand oddly well: Italian flair, passion and craft, but with a taste for scientific, reliable engineering... if you buy into stereotypes, that is.
At Bassocontinuo headquarters a love for motorsport reveals itself immediately as we walk in. Indeed this is directly reflected in some of the finishes available for your audio racks, such as Le Mans: a tasteful combination of black leather with red stitching.
Carbon fibre
After a lovely pizza and a drive just shy of an hour, our first production stop was the carbon fibre workshop. Here a dedicated craftswoman with extensive specialist training laboriously creates the carbon fibre parts of the Revolution X racks. The material is layered in sheets into a custom mould, cut and folded in a very particular way. This is not just a cosmetic finish, but rather making full use of carbon fibre as an effective weight-saving, load-bearing, dampening material.
This is the X-shaped supporting frame which holds up the shelf. Key parts of the frame are reinforced with extra layers of carbon fibre after extensive testing reveals where most of the stress is concentrated. We watched her for a good hour, if not longer, producing just this one part in a total flow state.
Woodwork
At another site nearby, a dedicated carpenter is manufacturing shelves. These are machine cut one-by-one to exact measurements, then hand-finished to avoid rough surfaces and hard edges.
Leather
At Bassocontinuo’s headquarters, leather man Andrea Innocenti wraps the wood shelves in Italian leather, carefully ensuring the stitched seams are aligned perfectly along the shelf edges. It is evident from the speed of his work that he has done this over a thousand times.
Metal parts
Bassocontinuo’s custom metal parts (primarily the modular rack legs) are machine cut, then finished by hand with sandpaper. We are especially fond of the spiked feet of the Reference Line, beautiful pieces in their own right and they add a wonderful lightness and elegance to an otherwise solid, heavy rack.
Copper is also available and certainly an aesthetic that we at Boyer will be interested in when we order our own racks.
The cylindrical metal legs of the Classic, Reference, Ultimate and Revolution X lines are modular; you can stack them to adjust the height of shelves so that as your system grows or changes, your rack can evolve with ease to accommodate it.