Modern Musical Magic: The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak ‘Supersonnerie’ In Titanium
Using old skill and new tech to break the sound barrier.
The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Supersonnerie is a relatively new take on constructing a minute repeater, but it has had a long development period. The “Supersonnerie” part of the name refers to the technology pioneered by AP to produce a minute repeater capable of both high volume, and high quality sound. Hearing a well-constructed, properly tuned minute repeater do its thing might lead you to think that creating such a complication is a walk in the park. But the minute repeater is by far the hardest complication for a watchmaker to master – making a chiming wristwatch means overcoming such fundamental challenges in engineering that you wonder how it’s possible at all. It was in an attempt to break new ground, and, so to speak, ring in a new era in minute repeaters, that AP introduced the Supersonnerie.
Birth Of A New Sound
The very first public presentation of the Supersonnerie technology was in 2014, when the first Supersonnerie concept watch debuted at SIHH. This was a Concept watch with a capital C. The Royal Oak Concept watches, with their distinctive, aggressively geometric case and pyramidal case profile, go all the way back to 2002, and the first watch was technically very much ahead of its time, as you’d expect from the name – the case was made of an aerospace alloy called Alacrite, and the movement featured a new complication. This was a “dynamographe” which showed the amount of torque being delivered by the mainspring, which is distinct from the power reserve (the former shows energy available to the going train while the latter shows how much running time is left).
The first repeater in the Concept series was also the first “RD” series watch (the RD stands for Research and Development, unsurprisingly.) The series is now in its fourth iteration, with the RD#4 Code 11.59 Universelle, but the RD#1 Royal Oak Concept Supersonnerie was the launch platform for the Supersonnerie technology in 2015.
A conventional minute repeater has two sides to it. One is under the dial, and it’s the mechanism that senses the position of the hour and minute hands, and translates that physical position into a series of chimes that represent the time. Traditionally, there are two circular gongs made out of hardened steel wire, tuned to two different notes. A repeater usually strikes the hours on the lower tuned of the two gongs, then the number of quarter hours past the hour as a double strike on both gongs, and finally, the number of minutes past the quarter on the higher pitched of the two gongs. The longest possible strike is 12:59, when there are 12 hour strikes, three double chime quarter strikes, and finally, 14 minute strikes. The other side of the repeater is behind the caseback. Here’s where you’ll find the actual hammers and gongs.
Making Time Musical
A repeater is unique among complications in that it is an audible rather than visual complication (although at a much less complex level, the alarm watch is an audible complication as well) and it turns the watch into something of a miniature musical instrument. Ideally the sound of a repeater should be reasonably audible over ambient noise, but it should also be rich and pleasantly harmonious and doing both at the same time is hard enough that making repeaters has been a highly specialized and rare craft for centuries.
The basic problem in terms of achieving both good volume and good tone, is that the size of a wristwatch, as well as the materials most commonly used, are working against you. The hammers that strike the gongs, as well as the gongs themselves, are minute in comparison to actual musical instruments, and the amount of sound energy released is correspondingly small. The gongs are also enclosed in the watch case (obviously) and the sound has to travel through the case back, case flank, and the dial and crystal, losing energy every step of the way. Moreover, the gaskets used to make watches water resistant also deaden sound, which is why repeaters historically have not been complications you’d wear anywhere near water.
In the mid-2000s, however, with complicated watchmaking in the middle of a roaring comeback, various brands began experimenting with new materials, as well as new methods for producing better volume and better sound transmission. In 2005, for instance, Jaeger-LeCoultre introduced its “crystal gong” system, in the Master Minute Repeater, in which the gongs, rather than being attached to the back of the movement, were fixed to a metal coating on the underside of the dial. The sound of the gongs traveled more efficiently through the crystal, which also acted as an excellent resonator.
A Hidden Amplifier
The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Supersonnerie is built around a similar idea: find a way to improve the resonant characteristics of the case to get better volume and tone. Rather than attach the gongs to the dial, however, AP re-engineered the caseback. The Supersonnerie has a thin, metal membrane – a kind of soundboard – to which the repeater gongs are attached, and which acts as the inner caseback for the watch. An outer caseback protects the resonating membrane, and has apertures through which sound can escape the watch without being muffled by the case material.
The movement is AP caliber 2935. This is as fine a piece of work as the Vallée de Joux has ever produced, with beautifully shaped bridges, finished with elaborate beveling and a whole cornucopia of other classic finishing techniques. I always find it a bit of a shame that some of the most beautiful steelwork in fine watchmaking – the racks and levers of the repeating mechanism – are hidden under the dial but then, the joy of fine watchmaking historically was often in knowing the quality was there even if you couldn’t see it, and there’s no doubt that this is a fine example of beauty being more than skin-deep, to put it mildly.
Traditionally, minute repeaters were thought to sound best with rose gold cases (which had to be worked properly in order to get the rigidity necessary for the best sound) with platinum trailing behind gold, as the density and crystal structure of the latter tends to deaden sound ( That said, there are always exceptions; I’ve heard a few platinum repeaters that sounded fantastic, including a 26mm by 26mm platinum repeater made by AP in 1932, at the AP museum, during a visit in 2016). The AP RO Supersonnerie in titanium’s case, on the other hand, takes advantage of the low mass and high rigidity of titanium to, so to speak, supercharge the sound of the Supersonnerie.
The Royal Oak Supersonnerie is not, technically, the first Royal Oak minute repeater – that honor goes to the RD#1, although the Royal Oak Supersonnerie is as far as I know, the first time that Audemars Piguet has put a repeater in a standard-configuration Royal Oak case. For its size, it’s a very wearable watch – at 42mm x 14mm, it’s not sliding under any shirt cuffs and it might not be sliding under any suit cuffs either, for that matter, but then, a watch like this is not really meant as a daily-driver exercise in discretion.
That said, however, it has all the charismatic angularity that has made the Royal Oak family famous, and, if you are not attracted to the Code 11.59 collection, it’s a chance to get in one package, two things for which Audemars Piguet is justly famous: the Royal Oak, and a chiming complication. The dial is quite spectacular as well, speaking of classic Royal Oak design – it’s a mega-tapisserie engine turned dial, finished in a color gradient fading from a deep blue at the center of the dial, to black at the edge. The Royal Oak Supersonnerie is also unusual in having a time-only dial with small seconds. Since 1972, when the Royal Oak debuted, RO watches have had either no running seconds, or center seconds hands (with the exception of the Royal Oak chronograph models).
The Royal Oak Supersonnerie in titanium brings a lot of optimum solutions together in a single watch, and although it doesn’t fit the classic definition of a daily wear timepiece, it is considerably more robust than a traditionally constructed minute repeater. The grade-5 titanium case is tough, durable, and lightweight, making it very comfortable on the wrist as long as the sheer size of the case isn’t a deal-breaker, and the use of an inner caseback that acts as a resonating membrane, means that the watch is far more water resistant than most repeaters – twenty meters, which is a bit shy of the thirty to fifty meter depth rating you’d hope for from a sports watch, but then, the amazing thing is that it is water resistant at all.
There are other features built into the RO Supersonnerie designed to improve robustness and convenience – the crown is locked while the repeater is striking, to prevent accidental damage to the mechanism, and the caliber 2953 has been constructed so that, if there are no quarter hours to strike (at 2:14, for instance) there is no delay between the hour and minute strikes, as is the case with traditionally made repeaters.
The Royal Oak Supersonnerie is a groundbreaking piece of watchmaking technology, but it’s also a continuation of a very old tradition of chiming complications at AP (in its first decade in business, Audemars Piguet produced a total of 28 grande sonnerie pocket watches). More than almost any other watch from AP I can think of, it brings together the best of the old and the new – a song of past, present, and future on the wrist.
The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak “Supersonnerie” In Titanium: case, grade 5 titanium, 20M water resistant, 42mm x 14mm, with blue-black gradient “mega-tapisserie” dial; applied indexes. Movement, AP caliber 2953, 30mm diameter, with minute repeater, safety mechanism for blocking hand setting during chiming, and mechanism for eliminating gap between hour and minute strikes when there is no hour strike. 72 hour power reserve, hand-wound, running at 21,600 vph in 32 jewels. Limited edition of 5 pieces.