The Beautiful Music of Chopard’s New L.U.C Grand Strike, with Karl-Fritz Scheufele

Yes, thank you.

Yeah, that's not an easy one because we're looking at one of the most complicated mechanisms, chiming mechanisms that we've made as a brand for sure, but it's probably also one of the most complex mechanisms you find in... As you said, when you're beginning in watches, getting interested in complications, I like to look at the function first. And the chiming watches have a very interesting history because they were used to tell time when there was no lights around at the time where you had candles. And so it was a pretty interesting way of making your watch tell you the time even when it was completely dark. So that's the first thing to keep in mind is we're reading time with sound. And on a grand strike, on a gren, you're reading time with sound at a whole different level because you have different modes that let you either have all the time being read, only a little bit of the time, or you put it on mute so you're not disturbing anyone in a meeting. So in a nutshell, it's a watch that tells the time with the sound with different functionalities.

On the grand strike you have the grenery which is the most complete way to tell the time. So hours quarters. Then you have the petitenary which will not give you the quarters. And you have the mute which will not make the watch chime at all. To change the modes we have this little nifty button here which you can press. It gives you a nice haptic feedback a bit like on a ball pen. So this was the inspiration. Exactly. Because you have this nice feeling when you press on a ball pen. It has a nice kind of analog feel. Very satisfying. And so you can change the mode with this. Right now we are on P which is we switch over to Gener and Sance or silence.

So 12 hours of power reserve in the grand strike mode which is the most energy thirsty setting of the watch because basically your watch is kind of always chiming. And it was funny we were showing it to a couple of collectors and it was in gren mode and it seemed like the watch just always kept chiming. So having that much power reserve when you're in a mode such as is important because you want to be able to hear your watch. So 12 hours is a pretty comfortable power reserve for such a watch. So the power reserve is not necessarily a patent that we focused on. But that's due mostly to the fact that we have two barrels. one to store the energy for the chiming mechanism and one that is for keeping time basically. And the fact that you have two barrels allows you to store energy over and deliver it over a longer time and you do so by turning it one way to fill up the barrel for the time and the other way for the chiming mechanism. What we didn't mention about the three modes that you can set on,

and that's it was a very satisfying thing to do and also the little sound it gives off is something that a lot of watch collectors of course enjoy.