Ulysse Nardin Sonata Cathedral Dual Time Alarm 670 88 213 Ulysse Nardin Watch Review

Hi, this is Tim of The 1916 Company. Welcome and thanks for logging on. If you love this watch, email me, timosso at the1916company.com for purchase pricing and availability questions concerning this watch. And this watch is one of my favorite models of all time from any brand in any era. Launched in 2005, this is the Ulysse Nardin Sonata Cathedral, a timepiece that is literally the cathedral gong minute repeater of alarm watches. It's a GMT, it's an alarm, it's got a lot of other features built in. So let's get started. The original Sonata came out in 2003. The Cathedral features cathedral gongs that wrap one and a half times around the movement and is very much like a minute repeater. You've got a strike governor on the front, that's the centrifugal governor. On the back, if we take a quick look, you can see the steel striker present right there and then the gongs wrap around the movement. So the watch is 42 millimeters in diameter. It's 13.5 millimeters thick. From lug to lug, 50 millimeters. It's got a nice broad 21 millimeter spacing between the lugs and they don't short you the leather at UN. We do have a conforming profile here, so it fuses very close to the curve of the case and the slope of the lugs. That looks great. It's a very integrated, clean look, one flowing from case to the strap and strap to the case, just like that, but it does create some stiffness. So keep that in mind. There's a little bit of a fight and a flare virtual size here. Taking a look at the clasp, they didn't pinch the pennies. Full white gold, twin trigger release. You can see media blast internally, ceramic spring-loaded pin snaps because the gold cannot wear down the ceramic. That part will remain snappy indefinitely and you have to press both triggers to pop this open. It won't fly open inadvertently. It's not friction fit. UN branding on the clasp and then rolling around to the case itself. We've got beautiful lugs, which are fluted on their sides and you can see the assembly of the case appears to be a laborious welded lug assembly and this was a low volume prestige model. So low volume hand welded and filed lugs certainly make sense. In this case, we've got a lovely little lacquer insert on the crown, reminding you that for much of its history, Ulysse Nardin's calling card was its precision marine chronometers, navigation clocks used on ships. We've got a lovely concave bezel profile that visually thins the watch quite a bit and we have a lot of subsidiary controls. Let's start with the most basic. This is a system that goes back to the old San Marco GMT plus minus, the early 90s. I believe 94 is when that technology came out, but we have the ability to jump the hour hand forward and backwards and note the date. We'll follow it as we travel time zones and note that the watch will actually correct the countdown alarm function. So if you do have the watch set in a countdown mode to sound the alarm after a particular period of time, rather than a time of day, it will ensure that in a 24-hour format, you still have clarity about what time of day that alarm is going off and it will stay synchronized. So this is the countdown dial, but this is also the 24-hour dial. Keep that in mind. This is your conventional alarm set. This is your 24 and countdown style portrayal. Now the way this all works is I may as well go through all of what we're talking about here. We've got an on-off function for the alarm just like that. And then when you pull this crown out, we've got a bi-directional quick set for the date, which is a double-digit date to be set in both directions. Now on the other side, we have a crown that in its first position moves the time at center, and that is keyed to the countdown. So let's say you want to hear the alarm. You have to wind it up first. And note it strikes because I wind counterclockwise. That's how you wind the alarm. You wind clockwise, that winds the watch. Two different power supplies. And then you've got the on-off functionality. But if you want to hear the alarm immediately, you adjust the countdown dial to zero. Now if you pull the crown out all the way, you can see now I'm setting both of the time scales used to judge the alarm. And so you can see right here how this works. I have a three-hour countdown set because I have set the watch to chime at 12 o'clock, and it is currently nine. So it's three hours. That's the countdown to my alarm. See how that works? Very cool. Now we turn the light off. You can see it's actually quite well loomed, and you could set your local time using these triggers. But at the bottom, we have a 24-hour secondary time zone. So you could see that moves at half the speed of the local 12-hour hand at the center of the dial. The only feature the watch really doesn't have that I would like it to have is hacking seconds, but it is so rich with features that can be forgiven. And again, all you have to do is set the countdown. If you just want to hear the alarm, nothing else matters. You don't care what time is set. You just set it to zero, and you fire it up. Now you might ask, what is so special about Cathedral Gongs that they have to be in the name of the watch? Well, they don't necessarily create a louder chime, but what they do is they create a higher quality chime. The sonic quality, the tonal quality of it is more refined. It is a more sophisticated setup that requires more regulation and tuning. And then you can see on the dial side, we've got quite a bit going on. We've got dial side assembly hardware. Note that we have both fired blue and polished screws. We've got Cote de Genève. We've got beveling and polished satination on the bezels framing the alarm setting dials. It's a very sophisticated look. Then we turn it over. We have caliber 67, which like a lot of Ulysse Nardin automatics of this period had its roots in the old Mania 1340 chronograph caliber. So it preserves the bi-directional magic lever style winding system. This one adds ceramic ball bearings to the rotor to improve efficiency. It's a four Hertz beat rate with a 42 hour power reserve. You can see we've got a 22 carat Gratinement or hand scraped white gold rotor with an inserted lacquer anchor to remind us. And then Sonata, you got the little clef on the name. Incredibly, once you put it all together, the dual time, the double date, the chiming system, the base movement, you wind up with you are not hallucinating 109 jewels in this movement. And you can see it's nicely decorated circular Cote de Genève Gratinement. We have the blued screws. We have engine turning on the base plate, polish on the strikers. It's just a beautiful watch that is packed with features, completely unique. And with Cathedral gongs, the metal striker and the centrifugal governor, it can rightly be called the minute repeater of alarm watches. 30 meters water resistance. You don't want to take this particular Ulysse Nardin swimming, but then that's why you've got a Marine. Reach out to team also at the1916company.com for purchase and pricing details.