This is the Supersonnerie in black ceramic with a smoked sapphire dial, and it is the most materially adventurous watch in the Code 11.59 collection. Two decisions here are unusual on their own and almost unprecedented together. The first is the case: ceramic rather than gold on a minute repeater, which matters because a chiming watch has to transmit sound outward rather than absorb it, and ceramic is a harder and more acoustically transparent material than any precious metal. The second is the dial, which is smoked sapphire rather than enamel or lacquer, meaning the surface is a crystal graded toward black rather than a coating applied to a metal base. The case is 41 mm across and 13.6 mm thick, the markers and hands are rose gold, and it is no longer part of the current collection.
The case measures 41 mm across and 13.6 mm thick in black ceramic, which is remarkably slim for a repeater, since chiming watches are normally thick to give the gongs and the striking train room. Ceramic is doing acoustic work before it is doing anything else. Gold is dense and damps a strike; ceramic is hard, light and considerably more transparent to sound, and the choice here follows from the chime rather than from the wrist, though the wrist benefits as well because ceramic weighs a fraction of what gold does at the same dimensions. Ceramic is also far harder to manufacture, since the case has to be produced in a material that cannot be corrected once fired, and on a repeater the tolerances are tighter than on an ordinary watch because the case is part of the instrument rather than a container for it. The dial is black smoked sapphire. Sapphire is a crystal rather than a coating, so light passes into it rather than reflecting off a painted surface, and grading it toward black produces a dial with genuine depth and no visible substrate. Against it the applied hour markers and hands are rose gold, and the warm metal against a black crystal is the only colour anywhere on the watch. The strap is black rubber-coated with a rose gold folding clasp, so the rose gold appears in exactly two places and nowhere else. The rubber-coated construction is also the acoustically consistent choice, since a strap contributes nothing to a chime but a heavy one changes how the watch sits against the wrist and therefore how much of the case is damped by contact. A light strap on a light case keeps the watch sitting on the wrist rather than pressed into it. The folding clasp keeps the strap in a closed loop, which suits a watch its owner handles deliberately and often, since the entire function exists to be activated rather than merely worn.
The function set is a minute repeater with hours, minutes and small seconds. On demand the repeater sounds the current time, striking the hours, the quarters and the remaining minutes on gongs of differing pitch, so the time can be heard rather than seen. It is the oldest genuinely useful complication in watchmaking, older than any practical means of lighting a dial, and it endures as the most difficult thing a manufacturer can build, because the mechanism is audible and every flaw in it is apparent to anyone within earshot. The Supersonnerie work exists specifically to make that sound carry from a wristwatch, and in this reference the case material is part of that work rather than a styling decision made alongside it. There is no date and no further complication, which is correct, since a repeater already asks a great deal of both the movement and the dial.
Within Audemars Piguet's structure Code 11.59 was introduced as a third pillar alongside the Royal Oak and the Offshore and 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 top of the collection, above the perpetual calendars, the tourbillons and the chronographs. Its immediate sibling is the white gold version with a smoked blue enamel dial, which answers the same complication with entirely traditional materials, and the pair is the clearest demonstration available of how far material choice can separate two watches carrying the same mechanism. The same acoustic work also appears in the Royal Oak Concept at 44 mm in titanium, which is the third answer to the same question.
This reference is for a collector who wants the hardest complication in watchmaking and wants it in materials the industry mostly reserves for sports watches. That is a genuinely unusual combination, since repeaters are almost always sold in precious metal to buyers who expect it. Black ceramic and smoked sapphire produce a watch that gives away nothing about what it contains, which on a complication whose entire purpose is to be heard is a deliberate and rather good joke. The rose gold markers are the only concession to convention anywhere on it. Now that the reference has left the catalogue the production is closed, and chiming watches are produced in the smallest numbers of anything any manufacturer makes. The buyer is someone who wants the watch to be silent until it is not.
