Excalibur Diabolus in Machina is the latest Roger Dubuis feat combining minute repeater and flying tourbillon. Traditionally, the minute repeater allows the time to be controlled by means of a pushpiece that activates a chime with low tones for the hours, high tones for the minutes and two tones for the quarters of an hour, but the watchmakers at Roger Dubuis have not limited themselves to this. In fact, they have added a number of functions, first and foremost a disc at 11 o'clock on which the words - Hours Quarters and Minutes - appear and which starts to turn as soon as the minute repeater is activated, visually illustrating the time intervals that are playing. To achieve this, the watchmakers added the main touch system of the minute repeater, which forces the wearer to look for the hour by touch before striking the time, for the benefit of this second visual indication. A second function is the one positioned between 3 and 4 o'clock: this is a function indicator which, thanks to a lever, allows the watch owner to know instantly whether his watch is in the 'manual winding' or 'time setting' position. This visual safety is extremely important, since adjusting the watch while the minute repeater is running can damage the movement. And finally, one last function: the minute repeater push-piece, equipped with a mechanism called "all or nothing", which allows the minute repeater to be activated only if its push-piece has been pushed all the way in order to avoid accidental activation of the mechanism or to avoid getting only a partial reading of the time. Roger Dubuis has chosen to tune his minute repeater to the sound of the tritone, the famous 'Diabolus in Musica' banished from medieval religious music, an interval found for example in Camille Saint-Saëns' symphonic poem, 'Danse Macabre'. The minute repeater is joined by the Roger Dubuis flying tourbillon, to counteract the effects of the earth's gravitational force on the precision of the movement and the running of the hands.
