Video: I don’t wear a watch and I hate time and yet I’m still so very impressed with the movement of this watch by FP Journe. It’s stunning and it is the most complicated watch that FP Journe makes because it’s a grande sonniere watch. Which means, it’s a complication that is able to audibly chime out the time.
Hodinkee took a deep dive into the making of the FP Journe Sonnerie Souveraine and it’s a stunner. Here is Hodinkee explaining what exactly the complication of a Grande Sonniere is:
Quickly — for anyone that doesn’t know what a sonnerie is, it is a watch with an active striking mechanism that chimes the quarters and hours without activation from the user. A grande sonnerie strikes the hoursand the quarters each quarter. So, at 3:15, with a grande sonnerie, you would hear three chimes (dongs) for the hours, and then one strike (ding dong) for the first quarter. At 3:30, you would again hear three chimes for the hours, and then two strikes for two quarters.
I really think I could watch masters of their craft work forever.