Snowalps.com: an interesting Italian ski gear review site

[theorist]

I recently came upon an interesting Italian ski review site, snowalps.com (aka Neveitalia). I'd posted about it on Epic, but it occurred to me I should mention it here as well, since it might be of particular interest to PTMS-ers, for two reasons. First, their focus is on narrower boards. Second, I recalled one poster here mentioning that the Head Supershape, one of the most well-regarded skis on this site, generally did not garner good reviews from the commercial sites. However, snowalps.com reviewed the 2012 Supershape and gave it extremely high scores (including 4.5/5 stars for initiation, which may have been the highest for all the 2012 skis they reviewed; they did make one criticism, which perhaps could be obviated by more flexion at the transition; http://www.snowalps.com/materiali/sci/2 ... supershape) -- suggesting that their observations on skis might accord more closely to your own.

The site does have some limitations:

(1) It’s in Italian, so you’ll need to rely on Google Translate if you don’t speak the language. Google's machine translation is awkward, but it's good enough to give the gist -- just remember that "spatula" (Google's English rendering of the Italian "spatola") actually refers to the ski's tip .

(2) The number of testers they are able to get on each ski varies significantly, particularly for the 2014 reviews -- some skis had nine testers, others three, and a few only one (but at least they publish this info. -- see point no. 2, below).

Nevertheless, the site is interesting, as it distinguishes itself from other commercial sites I’ve seen (Ski, Skiing, Ski Canada, Real Skiers) in two key respects:

(1) They publish strongly negative reviews of skis they don’t like. And I mean *really* negative -- seemingly with nothing held back.

(2) For each ski, they (usually) list each tester’s name, height, weight, and skiing background, along with the tester’s individual scores and comments, and the size of the ski the tester tried. This is very useful information, for obvious reasons.

Here are links to their reviews for 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively. These front-pages are in English, but you’ll need to use Google Translate to read the individual reviews.
http://www.snowalps.com/materiali/sci/2012
http://www.snowalps.com/materiali/sci/2013
http://www.snowalps.com/materiali/sci/2014

I don’t know the “backstory” on this site, and on their gear reviews in particular, so if anyone does I’d be interested in learning more. I hope you find this info. useful!

[Max_501]

The gave the SS 3.5 out of 5 for Carving. That doesn't match my experience on the SS.

[theorist]

The gave the SS 3.5 out of 5 for Carving. That doesn't match my experience on the SS.

Yeah, they gave higher carving scores to the '12 iSupershape Speed (4 stars) and '12 WorldCup iSpeed (4.5 stars), but a bit lower to both (4 stars) on initiation. It would have been nice if they had a descriptive definition of precisely what they want the testers to look for in the carving score, but I couldn't find one. Further, it's worth noting that these are averages, and individual testers give very different scores (too bad they don't give standard deviations). OTOH, I think it's interesting to find a tester that reacts to skis you know the same way you have, and see what he or she says about other models -- it might give some guidance on what to demo.

And of course, I acknowledge that all these sites have a certain limitation on their utility. I just thought this one was a bit more interesting than most.