In upscale wrist watches, complications are cause célèbre and coin cramps. The model that put Swiss watch brand Urwerk on the map was the 103, a wandering hour complication with four rotating discs on a revolving Maltese cross. As a numbered disc's pointer traverses the minute markers at the bottom edge, the next disc approaches showing the new hour as the other disc departs. A hidden skip mechanism advances the hour markers of the discs. It's how three values per disc times four equal the necessary twelve. According to AI Overview, when the hand-wound 103 launched in 2003, it sold between $25'740 and $51'479 depending on chosen materials and white or rose-gold execution. A good 20 years later Urwerk are going strong whilst micro brands like Atowak, Nubeo and Xeric have their own spins on the wandering hour based on budget Japanese Miyota movements. Those are realized with three arms and either rotating discs or flipping barrels like the above Nubeo Skylab. Very much unlike the smaller Art Nouveau-styled Swiss celebrating restraint and elegance and a real alligator heavily padded band, the 48mm candy-coloured automatic from Hong Kong with steel or rubber bands lists at €1'927. Yet when I wrote this, Nubeo's web shop had discounted it to just €438, a companion version with two rubber straps to €329. For folks telling time by smartphone, a wrist watch is an anachronism from their parents' era. It could make anything beyond a cheap digital Casio with satellite uplink to an atomic clock an affront to Good Bookkeeping and precision. For the budget-bearing watch aficionado meanwhile, today's plethora of micro brands adapting cost-effective Chinese or Japanese movements offers opportunities to go Swiss Swanky without the matching invoice. What once was exclusive and pure luxury has become attainable to the masses.
Urwerk with barrel-based three-armed wandering-hour complication | Xeric with forthcoming jumping-hour complication.
Xeric's new Retroscope quartz watch with steel case, sapphire crystal and jump-hour complication just then asked €209 on a pre-order special where a vintage Cartier Rotonde might fetch €17'000. This "upmanship from the cheap seats" has led luxury brands like Rolex to make purchase of certain models contingent on us already owning lesser Rolex models. In Galway a local Rolex dealer on the High Street lost the franchise because they also sold competing brands Rolex no longer tolerates. The same happened to the Galway Volvo car dealer which performs my tune-ups and also sold Kia and Renault. Volvo wanted exclusive representation without on-floor cross shopping ops. It's how luxury brands attempt to keep more value-laden competitors at arm's length. Make ownership feel like membership in a ritzy club. Keep out the riffraff. It's happening in our industry, too. Be it one-brand shops to eliminate in-store competitors or popular and lucrative brands applying pressure on their retail partners to throw out inconvenient competitors. As much of hi-end hifi trends ever deeper into the luxury-goods sector, the same sales tactics apply. Who do we think pays for the rent of such store fronts in the right parts of town? Meanwhile the savvy shopper who knows full well that a satellite-uplinked solar-powered Casio does tell more precise time than a rotor/spring-driven Rolex also understands that a high-value hifi brand can offer sound every bit as good as the swish brigade – minus the gold plating, cachet of exclusivity, membership fee and possibly becoming a collector's item one day. Where watch complications might be cool especially when they cost no more than a generic fashion watch, complications in a hifi which nobody but us gets to see might not be cool. Hence it is so hot that relative to high-performance hi-value kit, we're living in a Golden Age of playback. We just need to know where to look, listen and shop. 6moons exists to help you populate that map mostly off the mainstream. For every Urwerk-equivalent hifi brand we might cover on rare occasion, you'll find twenty covers on hifi's versions of Aragon, Geckota or Vostok Europe which make affordable reliable very well-built products.
