Originally Posted by
trelhak
Omniums are a bad idea. The crankarms themselves are fine, but external bottom brackets are little more than marketing hype. They are a clever way to force you into buying a matching bottom bracket and crank set without being super-obvious about it.
This is no more of a problem than the fact that buying Sugino 75's forces you to get an ISO bottom in the 109mm range or suffer an eventually deformed taper, or buying Octalink DA's and having the choice between one of 3 Shimano BB's. Besides, the external BB for the SRAM Omniums is $25 and from what I can tell so far breaks in quite nice.
Also, I don't see how external is more than marketing hype when the
entire road world has moved on to it. External BB's and BB30 setups make much more sense mechanically than the old school stuff in my opinion - larger bearings are a better thing... the road world may or may not move to BB30 as it's standard but for now external reigns supreme and is noticeably stiffer.
Only real problem I've heard of with the Omniums / some external BB stuff is that you need to keep an eye on the non-drive crankarm as it occassionally has a tendency to loosen, but square taper stuff can loosen after the initial installation too.
Oh, I'm not necessarily saying square taper is bad either, as I've had 75's, currently ride 7600's on the trainer/street bike and like them just fine. I just think a lot of the professional track world is kind of backwards if you compare it to the heavily R&D influenced road world, in that some things are done very much so out of tradition more than anything else (1/8" chains, 144 BCD, square taper cranks).