The Royal Oak Offshore has carried a great many special dials across its production, but a VU meter is not a motif borrowed from watchmaking. It comes from audio equipment, where the meter is the needle display that shows signal level on a mixing desk or an amplifier, and putting one on a watch dial is a reference to recording rather than to horology. This is the Music Edition, and it makes that reference in white gold at 43 mm, with a bezel set with diamonds and a dial in blue aventurine carrying the meter picked out in gemstones. Aventurine is a glass with metallic flecks suspended through it that reads as a night sky rather than as a colour, and against that ground the meter appears to be lit from behind. The watch arrives on a blue rubber strap and is supplied with three further rubber straps in turquoise blue, yellow and green. It is no longer part of the current collection.
The case is 43 mm in white gold, which is the size the Offshore is most recognisable at and the one that gives the octagonal bezel and the exposed screws room to read as architecture rather than as detail. White gold on an Offshore is a deliberately quiet choice, because the metal looks like steel until it is handled, and on a watch that already carries a diamond bezel and a gem-set dial that restraint is what stops the design from collapsing into pure ornament. The bezel is set with diamonds, which on the Offshore's octagonal form produces a very different effect from a round bezel, since the stones have to follow eight straight runs and turn eight corners rather than sweeping continuously. The dial is blue aventurine. The material is not painted or lacquered, so the flecks sit at varying depths within the glass and the surface changes completely as the wrist moves, going from near-black in shadow to something closer to a deep field of light under direct illumination. The VU meter is set with gemstones and occupies the dial as a graphic element rather than as an instrument, its arc and needle rendered in stone against the aventurine. Hour markers are applied white gold, which keeps them tonally consistent with the case and the bezel and prevents a third metal colour from entering an already busy dial. The blue rubber strap fastens with a white gold folding clasp and runs on an interchangeable system, and the three additional straps are supplied in turquoise blue, yellow and green.
The movement is self-winding and the watch shows the time and nothing else. The VU meter is a motif, not a function, and it is worth being clear about that because a needle display on a dial invites the assumption that something is being measured. Nothing is. What the reference offers functionally is the interchangeable strap system, which allows the strap to be changed by hand without tools and is the reason four straps are supplied rather than one. On a watch built around colour that is a more meaningful feature than a complication would have been, since the same case and dial present very differently on turquoise blue than on yellow, and the owner is effectively given four versions of the watch. The absence of a chronograph is also a deliberate choice within the Offshore line rather than an omission. The Offshore is a collection where the chronograph is the default and the time-only references are the exceptions, so a time-only Offshore reads as unusual to anyone who knows the line. It also leaves the dial uninterrupted by counters, which is the only way a VU meter of this size could have been placed on it at all.
Within the Royal Oak Offshore the Music Edition sits among the references that use the case as a platform for a subject rather than as a sports watch. The Offshore was built as the larger, harder-edged answer to the Royal Oak and spent its early production establishing itself through chronographs and diving references, both of which are represented in the current line by the Diver at 42 mm and the chronograph references at 43 mm and above. Against those, a white gold time-only reference with an aventurine dial and a gem-set graphic is a different proposition entirely. It belongs with the special editions the collection produces in small numbers, where the case is recognisably an Offshore and everything mounted inside it is not. Audemars Piguet has a long association with music through its partnerships and its special editions, and references of this kind are how that association is expressed in the catalogue rather than only in marketing. Collectors who follow the Offshore tend to track these separately from the production references, because they are made in limited quantities and rarely repeated. The strap set is part of that separation. A production Offshore ships with one strap; this one ships with four, which signals that the reference was conceived as a set rather than as a single watch, and complete examples are identified partly on that basis.
This reference suits a collector who already owns a conventional Offshore and wants one that is unmistakably not conventional. It is not a first Royal Oak, and it is not the reference to buy if the intention is a sports watch that will be worn hard. The aventurine dial and the gem-set meter are the reasons to own it, and both require the watch to be looked at rather than used. White gold makes it discreet from a distance and considerably less so up close, which is the combination that tends to appeal to buyers who have moved past wanting a watch that announces itself immediately. Now that it has left the catalogue the production is closed at whatever was made, and special editions of this kind are produced in numbers far below the standard Offshore references. The buyer is someone with a specific relationship to music who wants that reflected in the watch rather than stated on it, and who values a piece that four straps can redirect into four different objects.
