Mountain Biking - Controversial Reviews????

Hi all


I have been reading reviews on www.mtbr.com concerning rims and mostly cranksets. My question is :
How can a product be an engineering masterpiece to some people and a total crap to some others? One example is Raceface prodigy xc cranks and DeoreXT cranks....some say they are the ultimate for the money and others acuse them badly...the same goes for Mavic 219, 317, rims..... I really cant get any real help on these reviews (on the contrary i get loads of help from my friends here...YOU guys). Today i bought the latest WhatMountainBike magazine...it has a crankset group test and it praises XT,XTR cranks as the best around for stiffness lightness and durability...however in also praises RF turbines and NextLP. Personally i have a great experience from XT discs and drivetrain... but also a great experience from the RF Deus stem....i was wondering if Deus is so good because its a high end RF component ...and if Prodigy cranks are up to the Deus quality that RF offered me so far. Most of the bike shops in the UK tell me to get XT cranks because if i go with raceface i should pick a higher end model such as Turbines and that Prodigy doesnt justify the money tag. Well whatever.....i still rely on you folks....for good quality advice....and i hope that i can usually return this advice.

Yannis.
Should you come to Greece lets taste some Acropolis Rally style downhills...
:beer:

I'm not a big fan of Shimano cranks. Why? This is the true reason! I don't like the way they LOOK! That's it! I like RF Products, they're well made, lightweight, strong and LOOK good! Plus, they come in different colors!

L8R

Rule 1 - I never trust mag reviews. NEVER EVER. They are payed and given products to review. There is one mag I have been reading for over a year and claims to a mtb mag and has never once reviewed a marzocchi product. They only reviews Rock shoxx and Fox...guess who also has ad space in the mag...yep.

Rule 2 - People have bad experiences or are crappy riders on review based sites. One bad experience and they will slam the product. I know of guys who hated a product so much (or even just a company) they would go on and instead of talking about the product intelligently they put 1 chillie and slam it to scare people off.

Rule 3 - That website should put riding styles and weight. Some products are wicked but they don't suit everyone's style or taste...

All of this said. I have a small group of people I actually trust, then mtbreview but taking everything said there with a grain of salt and then my mech. With those three groups you will never be steered wrong :)

You've got to be careful about review sites like mtbr. Like Maelstrom said, some people have one bad experience and slam the product. Others vary in weight and riding style, offering up wildly differing opinions. And finally, many of the reviewers install the equipment themselves - and do it incorrectly. When something snaps or something won't shift correctly, its automaticall Shimano or SRAM's fault - when its really the knucklehead who installed the derrailleur but didn't do any adjusting at all. I read reveiws at mtbr.com when I am about to make a big purchase. It is one of the only places (Other than Bikeforums) where one can get tons of reveiws of a product. If the majority of the reviews are terrible, maybe I'll think about it or try it out more first. If the average rating is brought down by a few people who claim that their derrailleur didn't shift right out of the box when the put it on the bike (duh..) then I feel more secure with the overall opinion. I will often use a place like bikeforums before buying expensive items like wheels or bikes because I can tell from the posts that most of the members are serious about biking and will give reasonable opinions.

-Moab

Yeah, I read MTBR all the time, but I don't take extreme negative reviews seriously. If there's lots of reviews and it still gets a low rating it makes me suspicious. The more reviews the better.




To help ya out... I'd go with Race Face. I've got a set of Next LP carbons that I absolutely love. I've never seen ANYTHING by Race Face that just flat out sucked... they make good stuff in my opinion.

Thanks all!!!!! that is quality advice.

The problem with reviews, is people only want to put in there two cents when the product (a) sucks, or (b) is amazing for the price.

I have no reason to review my wheelset, i didnt get it for a deal, and it does what i expected to. To me, its just another bike part. I will however leave a negitive review for the seat post that broke last week for no reason.

I see guys....all in all is the performance of the Turbines so different with the prodigy cranks? Turbines cost 330$ here in the UK whereas Prodigies cost 140$

Besides weight, I doubt you'll feel a whole LOT of difference, but I imagine the Turbines will be a bit stiffer than the Prodigy cranks.