The Fourth Wheel, Issue 121
Review: Zenith Defy Extreme Diver and Zenith Defy Revival
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that finished recording series one of a podcast this week! Tim, my co-host and I, have now got a few weeks of editing and other business ahead of us, but it is coming. I’m excited - we’ve had a lot of fun making it (and learned a few things along the way) so I know you’re going to like it. At least, I really hope so. For now, please content yourself with the longest review I’ve written on TFW so far - a bit of a strange one, in some ways, but also something I really enjoyed getting stuck into. Plus, two leftover AMA responses from last week, and one really incredible new watch that I don’t think is getting enough love.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Ask Me Anything: Issue 120
Hall’s Gastronomy of Watchmaking
Fresh Detail On Chanel’s Investment In MB&F
Unsung Heroes: The Best Watches You’ve Forgotten Exist
World Exclusive: Horological Dicktionary On The Record
Ask Me Anything… overspill edition
I received so many interesting questions last week - if you haven’t caught up, do go and read them , because as ever you were really getting to the heart of things - that I actually forgot to answer two. My apologies! Here you go gents.
How about shedding some light on Grand Seiko’s dual escapement? - Tom Langlands
Tom goes on to say “I feel like it had kind of been left and forgotten” and suggests that it should be getting more attention than it does. Tom, you are not wrong, but for us to understand why that is, we need some context.
Grand Seiko launched the Calibre 9SA5 in March 2019 (can you already anticipate one reason why it has failed to secure its place in our collective subconsciousness?), in the SLGH002 model. What makes this movement special is that it introduced an entirely new escapement, a dual-impact escapement no less, and if you’re not clear why that’s special, in short: it never happens1. Coming up with improvements on the Swiss lever escapement used by the vast majority of the watch industry is expensive and time consuming and for most mainstream movements, good enough is good enough (despite what you may hear from any given brand about their pursuit of excellence; if you’re being told at length how dedicated a watch company is to innovation and improvement in its movement engineering, asking them why they persist with a 300-year old technology in the form of the lever escapement should at least pause them in their flow - or buy you enough time to make an exit).
Omega is the only other company to have industrialised a new escapement, the co-axial model as originally designed by George Daniels and over the last 25 years steadily optimised by its own team. To your point about why we don’t hear more from Grand Seiko about its escapement: it has only been five years, which isn’t long in this context - especially when you consider it launched it at the start of the pandemic. Just think about how much time and effort Omega has spent marketing the co-axial escapement as an idea, how it has had to constantly and repeatedly ram the message home, and how little people still care, in the market segment that it occupies, and I think you start to see why Grand Seiko, a company making a tenth of the volumes and considerably, monumentally less proficient at communicating generally, has not made the waves it arguably could have with this development.
The dual impact escapement developed by Grand Seiko is impressive because it improves the efficiency of the movement considerably. Yawn. Efficiency. So boooooooring, as my daughter would say. What’s more interesting is what that allows you to do: you can have a high-beat movement (5Hz), which is good for daily rate accuracy (although the 9SA5 isn’t regulated to chronometer specs, which I feel is a shame) without any compromise in power reserve, which is normally what happens. Grand Seiko has given us an 80-hour, twin barrel movement that runs faster and for longer than most comparable calibres; it’s also thin, good-looking and relatively robust. It really is an outstanding movement and if you’re serious about the actual watchmaking side of this hobby, you should want one. For a better and more in-depth account of its technical merits, I recommend Cheryl Chia’s piece for Revolution and Jack Forster’s for Hodinkee, as well as this piece by a trained watchmaker for Time+Tide.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of watch customers at this level aren’t fascinated by movement construction and marginal efficiency gains - or even significant ones. That’s just life - people who do care about this stuff can and do take a degree of pride in being in a minority. I’ll say this Tom: you’ve made me want to buy one, so that’s something.
Why does Tudor do GPHG awards but Rolex doesnt? - time.the.destroyer on Instagram
As it happens, I have written about this before but I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s quicker and easier to write it again than find exactly where (come on Substack, sort it out). Besides, the context has evolved slightly since then.
In a nutshell, though, my answer is the same: Rolex doesn’t need to. Rolex has absolutely nothing to gain by allowing its watches to compete on a level playing field with others. It can only lose; such is its reputation that being defeated in any category would be humiliating, and winning would only measure up to, rather than surpass, expectations. It has no need of the marketing halo that a GPHG nomination or win can bring to a smaller brand, no need of a sales lift, no need of increased brand awareness and certainly no need to curry favour within industry circles. It’s the same for Patek Philippe, or A. Lange & Sohne.
The opposite is true of Tudor; despite its remarkable success over the last decade Tudor still only sells around 25 per cent as many watches as Rolex (based on the various estimates I hear… this is a very rough figure), and as the events of the early 2000s show, it is vulnerable in ways that Rolex is not. Just because Tudor is on a firm footing now does not mean it always will be, and the powers that be will understand that. It competes with TAG Heuer and Breitling and Longines as equals, rather than from a position of overwhelming market dominance as Rolex does.
This is also why Tudor does all the other things Rolex doesn’t: ceramic cases, bronze cases, limited editions, retailer tie-ins, partnerships and sponsorships not at the level of sponsoring an entire sport, charity auctions, new model families, manufacture visits, fun and friendly press events… It does these things because it needs to avail itself of the full toolkit. Rolex could ignore everyone, do nothing, launch nothing, say nothing and it would still kick everyone’s ass, commercially speaking, from Monday to Friday and back again. That’s the power of the brand.
Conflict of interest update
I take seriously accusations that ‘the watch media’ is fundamentally corrupt2, so as well as sticking up for it whenever I get the chance, I also feel bound to point out the kind of thing that makes people say that in the first place. This week we’re in the podcast world, still in many ways the Wild West of media scrutiny (as I discussed with Felix and Andy on OT:The Podcast last week).
How many people here know that Scottish Watches co-host David Sharp works for Horage as Sales, Marketing and Operations Director? You certainly wouldn’t know it from the Scottish Watches Instagram account, which has posted Horage watches to its feed five times this year so far, promoting new releases in glowing terms. Five times! I did a quick search on TheWatchSpace, the news aggregator app for watch media, and found just 13 posts on Horage since the start of the year across all titles (two of them were episodes of Scottish Watches…) I’m not saying SW should avoid Horage altogether but just a little disclaimer would let their 70,000 followers know exactly what’s going on. This kind of thing bugs me all the more when it comes from people who love to present themselves as straight-talking, blowing-away-the-bullshit types. To be totally fair, when it comes up on the podcast, Ricky and Dave are perfectly clear about that being his job and it’s often a source of interesting insight. So it’s a bit of an oversight perhaps, rather than a fiendish conspiracy, in not acknowledging it on social - but given that it’s not the first time, I felt like pointing it out.
Review: Zenith Defy Extreme and Defy Revival
At Watches & Wonders this year Zenith surprised people - at least, it surprised me - by releasing a number of dive watches. It isn’t something Zenith has done much of in the last decade, and it didn’t seem to be something the world was crying out for - certainly in the case of the Extreme Diver; the appeal of the Defy Revival is more easily understood. But neither watch made immediate sense to me, and that’s why I’ve decided to review them at great length here.
Reviewing watches is, I would think you’ll agree, meant to be about finding answers. But the more I think about these two, the more questions I have.
A lot of them begin with ‘why’. Why would anyone pay this much for a dive watch? Why does Zenith - a brand with some, but not a lot, of history in making diver’s watches - feel the need to make them now? Why am I looking at a time-only version of the El Primero calibre?
Some of them are specific to these watches. Did anyone really wear them for any extended period of time before signing off on their production, and if so, why in the name of all things practical is the clasp on the Defy Revival so hard to operate? How exactly do you get anything to be that bright orange without it requiring electricity? What is a helium release valve doing on a watch - the Extreme Diver - that we all know is never going deeper than five metres underwater?
Some of them are broad, almost to the point of philosophy. Are categorisations like ‘dive watch’ of any real use on a luxury watch, given that the practical definition is so abstract, so far removed from its purpose as a status symbol? At best, is it merely a stylistic designation? If that is the case, why bother with the helium release valve and so on? The answer to that one, of course, is that there’s only one thing more ridiculous than a ten grand dive watch that could go down to 600m, but never will, and that’s a ten grand watch that only looks like it could go down to 600m, but can’t.
Not all of these questions - and the implicit criticisms within them - are really aimed at Zenith. Calling into question the idea of a luxury dive watch is such old ground I felt timid, momentarily, about going there, but I do think there’s something worth talking about. This was the year of the solid gold Rolex Deepsea, after all.
Dive watches are among the purest and most easily understood tool watches. The early ones were necessary and practical, and enormously influential on an aesthetic level. There will always be a place in the world for the Rolex Submariner, and that gives legitimacy to anyone looking to produce a competitor watch as well. It’s a reductio ad absurdum to pull apart the value proposition of such a watch; we all know that if all you want is a watch that can survive in the water, you can buy a £300 Seiko Prospex or many other affordable dive watches. To misunderstand why the Submariner (and by this I really mean any dive watch costing more than one strictly needs to cost in order to get wet and not fail) exists is to misunderstand the nature of the luxury industry entirely.
On this basis, one answer to the question of why anyone would buy an expensive dive watch is simply that there are people who want a dive watch, and that’s their budget. It’s a Loro Piana baseball cap; an item that might very well be nicely made, but is primarily for people who think spending less is for other people. It’s a symbol; it’s representative of their level of wealth and their self-perception. Why do people buy expensive versions of anything? Again, a line of questioning which threatens to take us off down unnecessary and potentially circular detours. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Diver exists, and that costs two and a half times more than the Zenith, at £26,400. Any criticism I might make of the Defy Extreme Diver as pertains to value-for-money, you could very reasonably retort that this watch is less capable (300m vs 600m; no bracelet option; no pointless helium flap) and much more expensive, so could I please criticise that instead? We’re on very familiar ground when I say that the AP ROO Diver is purely a signifier that the wearer can afford an AP. Logic is not just out of the window, it’s taken flight and is winging its way towards the nearest leafy oasis.
Earlier remarks on the Submariner and luxury in general notwithstanding, it is worth noting that dive watches, perhaps uniquely among watches, don’t really get better as they get more expensive. Or rather, there is a threshold - a fairly low one - past which you can’t really continue to improve on the criteria that make a dive watch desirable. Depth rating is the obvious one; you can pay £12,450 for a Deepsea (4000m) or £22,350 for a Deepsea Challenge (11000m), but they’re the exceptions to the rule. You can get a 4000m rated watch for £5,000, for example. You could pick holes in my assertion, but as they increase in price, haute horlogerie watches are supposed to have better finishing, more complications, more exclusive and challenging craftsmanship, more exclusive availability and so on, and I would say that in general they do. With dive watches, there’s really nowhere to go. Mechanically, a £26k AP doesn’t really do anything a £260 Seiko doesn’t do, except cost more to repair.
And yet, this is still a wholly unsatisfactory situation. If we’re going to write off the genre of spendy dive watches as flashy trinkets, reduce them to Veblen goods of the most transparent nature, then why - as I said before - go to the specific effort of equipping the Extreme Diver with a different movement to the Defy Revival? Despite myself, I want to - in fact, I am going to - review this watch on a sensible, practical basis, and that means interrogating its technical qualities in a way that’s not going to mean much to anyone who buys one. But I’ll do it anyway: I was speaking to Jason Heaton lately on the subject of dive watches, and he said that for a long time his raison d’etre as a watch reviewer was to say look, it doesn’t matter if no-one intends to go diving with this watch, if the company that made it wants to market it as a dive watch, it should be capable of diving, and he’ll review it as such even if that’s the last thing anyone shelling out ten big ones for a Zenith is going to need to know.
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