The original tick tock — the loudest trend in watchmaking 

What I love about the watch industry is that the next big thing can often be hundreds of years old. On occasion it can be so old as to pre-date mechanical timekeeping altogether, as is the case with the audible indication of time. Long before clockwork became a thing, our ancestors had complex clepsydrae, water clocks so sophisticated that they could chime the time, allowing people to know the hour during the dark.

The modern rebirth of the striking watch is usually dated to 1989, when Patek Philippe relaunched the minute repeater wristwatch as part of its 150th anniversary celebrations. Since then, the minute repeater (a watch that will strike the hour, quarters and minutes at the push of a button) has enjoyed a triumphant return to favour as the prestige complication par excellence: the Everest of watchmaking. And just as Everest, once considered unscalable, can now get crowded, so the collector of contemporary complications has a truly remarkable choice. There is simply not enough space here to name the many excellent audible watches now offered. Suffice it to say that to be taken seriously as a high watchmaker, mastery of the minute repeater is almost mandatory: for instance, earlier this year Chopard celebrated 25 years of high watchmaking with a transparent minute repeater. 

Patek Philippe Fortissimo, £582,000

Chopard Luc Full Strike tourbillon, £343,000

Ongoing research into improving the performance of minute repeaters has been a leitmotif of high-end 21st-century watchmaking: from Jaeger-LeCoultre’s “crystal gong” technology of 2005 to last year’s Patek Philippe Fortissimo, a watch that Patek’s boffins tested against standard production minute repeaters in the company’s underground car park. The classic chime carried a respectable 10m – but the Fortissimo could be heard 80m away… Patek is going to need a bigger car park.

Brands have gone beyond the minute repeater and now offer the Grande Sonnerie

What is more, an increasing number of brands have gone beyond the minute repeater and now offer the Grande Sonnerie, which strikes hours and quarters automatically: Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, FP Journe, Audemars Piguet, Greubel Forsey and Bulgari among them. But a new era of chiming watches was inaugurated when, to celebrate its 175th birthday in 2014, Patek Philippe launched the Grandmaster Chime: a grande and petite sonnerie with full strike sequence; minute repeater; alarm with time strike; and, a world first, a perpetual date repeater. As well as chiming the time it chimes the date. A unique example fetched SFr31mn (about £27.338mn) at Christie’s, making it the most expensive watch ever auctioned. If you want to find out more, Patek has published a 200-page book about it. It’s technical.

Omega Olympic 1932 Chrono Chime, POA

Omega Speedmaster Chrono Chime, POA

Now Omega has entered a chiming chronograph that has been six years in the making. The company has form in chiming watches. Before it was called Omega, the company bore the name of its founder Louis Brandt and it was under the name of Brandt that it made the first wristwatch minute repeater in 1892. Thanks to the cult of the Speedmaster, today Omega is best known as a maker of chronographs. But when he took over the company in 2016 CEO Raynald Aeschlimann tasked his R&D department with creating a watch that combined these two aspects of Omega’s heritage. The result is a pair of watches that sound out elapsed time rather than time of day: one inspired by the 1892 minute repeater, the other using the familiar Speedmaster design.

A Lange & Söhne Richard Lange Minute Repeater, €409,000

Jacob & Co opera Godfather 50th Anniversary, $500,000

According to Gregory Kissling, vice president of product at Omega, the chief difficulty was “fusing the chronograph function with the brain of the minute repeater mechanism. We had to think of a new strategy regarding the time and that’s why we decided to indicate the minute with a low tone, then comes the double tone for the 10s of seconds. We use a high tone for the seconds.” Aeschlimann was so proud of Omega’s new Master Chronometer certification that he insisted this chiming timepiece meet its rigorous standards, among them resistance to extreme magnetic fields of 15,000 Gauss, which in practical terms means that you could wear your watch while in an MRI machine (although given the way MRI machines are designed you might find it difficult to check the time). Whether you buy the retro-look watch or the Speedy (or both) you will also get a resonance box to amplify the sound, made with 400-year-old Alpine spruce of the type that would have been familiar to virtuoso violinmaker Antonio Stradivari.

Bulgari Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater, POA

Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Control Memovox Timer, £30,000

The violin is also referenced in the shape of the winding crank of the special edition of another unusual audible timepiece from Jacob & Co. The brand has a following in the music world so aural watches are appropriate, and now its Opera Godfather 50th anniversary watch, which offers both tourbillon and tune, becomes available in a special edition to celebrate 50 years since the release of the prototypical gangster flick, with a case engraved to recall key scenes in the film. The Godfather raises a smile for its witty update of the tradition of placing a small music box mechanism inside a watch case, in this instance partially disguised as a miniature grand piano, with a seated figure of Don Corleone to give an idea of scale. And if you are thinking of going for a nap with the fishes the good news is that this watch is water-resistant to 30m.