Originally Posted by
unterhausen
Thanks for your edit. The builders that post here are mostly hobbyists, but some of us have a lot of experience. I'm always happy when I learn something, and it happens all the time. But it's unlikely that I would have my mind changed just because a well-known framebuilder had a strongly held opinion. Especially if it's about a subject that has been widely discussed for a very long time.
Well, I had missed the "n't" in his post, so it read that no one could tell a difference between flexible and stiff tubing.
Which, regardless of experience, is observably not true because some people could definitely tell Prestige from SL 10 out of 10 times, regardless of what anyone else can feel.
I remember reading a post by Richard Sachs where he said he can't tell an aluminum frameset from a steel one. I couldn't tell if he was bragging that the aluminum cross frames he builds are so perfectly spec'd for tube size that the result feels essentially like a steel bike, or if he just doesn't think much of this feel stuff, either.
Personally, I have not owned enough similarly equipped steel bikes to make an pronouncements about different tubesets, but I have owned enough Ti bikes to know that the way the tubes are shaped on those has a very noticeable affect on ride qualities. It's just that those ride qualities aren't necessarily good vs bad or fast vs slow.