A minute repeater in a 41 mm case only 13.6 mm thick is an unusual thing, and pairing it with a smoked blue enamel dial is unusual again. This is the Supersonnerie in the Code 11.59 collection, carrying the acoustic work Audemars Piguet developed to solve the oldest unsolved problem in chiming watches, which is that a repeater in a modern wristwatch is normally too quiet to be useful. The dial is enamel rather than lacquer, which is a materially different proposition: enamel is powdered glass fired onto the dial at high temperature, and it is the least forgiving dial material in watchmaking because a firing that goes wrong cannot be corrected, only discarded. The case is white gold, and it is no longer part of the current collection.
The case measures 41 mm across and 13.6 mm thick in white gold, and both figures matter on a repeater. Chiming watches are usually thick, because the gongs and the striking train need room, and holding one under fourteen millimetres in a 41 mm case is the engineering claim of the reference. White gold is the more conventional choice for a repeater than the titanium used on the Royal Oak Concept Supersonnerie, and it trades some acoustic transparency for the density and the finish a dress case wants. The bezel is white gold and matches, so the metal runs continuously from the crystal out to the lugs. The dial is smoked blue enamel. Enamel is fired glass rather than applied colour, so it has a depth and a hardness lacquer cannot reproduce, and it is the material that separates a genuinely expensive dial from an expensively finished one. Smoking it means grading the colour darker toward the perimeter, which is far harder in enamel than in lacquer because the gradient has to survive firing rather than being sprayed to order. The logo is transferred in enamel as well, which keeps every element on the dial in the same material rather than introducing applied metal for the signature. The applied hour markers and hands are white gold, cool against the blue and the only metal on the face. The inner bezel is black lacquer, giving the darkening perimeter somewhere to resolve. The strap is hand-stitched blue alligator in a large square scale with a white gold folding clasp. The folding clasp rather than a pin buckle is worth registering, since most references in this collection use a buckle to keep height off the underside of a slim case. On a repeater the reasoning inverts. A chiming watch is one an owner handles deliberately and often, since the whole function exists to be activated, and a folding clasp keeps the strap in a closed loop so the watch is taken on and off as a single movement rather than opened out each time. It also spreads the weight of a precious metal case across a wider span of the wrist.
The function set is a minute repeater with hours, minutes and small seconds. On demand the repeater chimes the current time, sounding the hours, the quarters and the remaining minutes on gongs of differing pitch, so the time can be read by ear rather than by eye. It is the oldest genuinely useful complication in watchmaking, predating any practical way of lighting a dial, and it survives now as the most difficult thing a manufacturer can build, because the mechanism is not merely intricate but audible and every flaw in it can be heard by anyone in the room. The Supersonnerie work is specifically about making that sound carry from a wristwatch rather than being absorbed by the case, and it is the differentiating claim of the reference rather than a refinement of an existing one. There is no date and no additional complication, which is correct: a repeater already asks a great deal of the movement and of the dial, and anything further would have compromised one or the other.
Within Audemars Piguet's structure Code 11.59 was launched as a third pillar alongside the Royal Oak and the Royal Oak Offshore, and it is the only one of the three not built around an octagonal bezel and an integrated bracelet. Within the line the 26395 repeaters sit at the very top, above the perpetual calendars, the tourbillons and the chronographs, and they are the references that settle the question of whether the collection is a serious platform. The same Supersonnerie work appears in the Royal Oak Concept at 44 mm in titanium, and comparing the two shows how differently the same acoustic problem is answered in a large technical case and a slim dress one. Its immediate sibling within the collection uses a black ceramic case and a smoked sapphire dial, which is a completely different material argument for the same complication.
This reference suits a collector who has worked past tourbillons and calendars and wants the complication that has to perform in public. A repeater is the one function in watchmaking that other people hear, and a poor one is obvious to everyone present, which makes it the least forgiving thing to own as well as to build. The enamel dial is the second reason to want this particular execution, since almost nothing else in the collection uses the material and it separates the reference from every lacquered dial around it. Now that it has left the catalogue the production is closed, and chiming watches are made in the smallest numbers of anything any manufacturer produces, because the number of people able to build and regulate them is very small. The buyer is someone who wants the hardest watch in the collection in its least demonstrative case.
