I am down to discuss this more. However, maybe we could try to do it over zoom, Team, skype, etc. I think we exhausted the amount of words we could legally use on forums!
I have two hats, one from Sooth and one as a university professor doing research on skiing. Even in the university framework, I would need some kind of justification to start a project. But in both cases, we are curious to discover more.
What is challenging with "vibrations" is that no one knows exactly what we are talking about (it is the same in hockey, in golf, tennis, etc). I am not really denying what you are all talking about. I am saying that I would not know what to measure (and even less how to measure it). It can be a very huge time/money sink to search for something when you don't know what it is, specially when a bunch of people already tried. We spent last year doing a ton of measurement on-snow and that didn't bring us very far. Snow varies, the testers are not very consistent, etc. We now have a testbed to measure vibration on ice skating rink (see #2 below). It is promising in that it is much more consistent (e.g., measuring edge grip). Even with this such a testbed, we are still struggling to really define what a good vibration response is.
One of my argument was also that I doubt that anyone out there has actually skied identical skis that just differ in their damping (or any another unknown property). When you do your perception test, are you really sure that one ski didn't had a slightly different torsional stiffness? A different mass? A different shape? Different properties will lead to different vibration generation, which I personally think that is, at this point, more important than damping. But I could be wrong.
We could try to resolve some of these issues with simple perception experiments. Happy to discuss that more if you want. Cool projects have always started with weird idea! ;-)
One thing that could help us to move fast on this is if you could find 5-10 skis from 2021-22 in the Sooth database that you feel are great and 5-10 skis that you feel are terrible. They would need to be relatively similar models (e.g., directional all mountain skis). We could then quickly see if there are some correlations between the properties that we are currently measuring and your ratings... We would not address damping, but we might find something much simpler!
You can look at these:
1. Comparative Study of Ski Damping Technologies by Accelerance Maps (https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/49/1/49)... that is super easy to do, but it is hard to figure out which part of the accelerance map is important for on-snow feels.
2. Effect of edged snow contact on the vibration of alpine skis (https://rdcu.be/cAYY7). The latest and greatest, but definitely not the end of that...
What must be recognized is that SoothSki is a business and, as such, there must be a business justification for any moves they make
I have two hats, one from Sooth and one as a university professor doing research on skiing. Even in the university framework, I would need some kind of justification to start a project. But in both cases, we are curious to discover more.
What is challenging with "vibrations" is that no one knows exactly what we are talking about (it is the same in hockey, in golf, tennis, etc). I am not really denying what you are all talking about. I am saying that I would not know what to measure (and even less how to measure it). It can be a very huge time/money sink to search for something when you don't know what it is, specially when a bunch of people already tried. We spent last year doing a ton of measurement on-snow and that didn't bring us very far. Snow varies, the testers are not very consistent, etc. We now have a testbed to measure vibration on ice skating rink (see #2 below). It is promising in that it is much more consistent (e.g., measuring edge grip). Even with this such a testbed, we are still struggling to really define what a good vibration response is.
One of my argument was also that I doubt that anyone out there has actually skied identical skis that just differ in their damping (or any another unknown property). When you do your perception test, are you really sure that one ski didn't had a slightly different torsional stiffness? A different mass? A different shape? Different properties will lead to different vibration generation, which I personally think that is, at this point, more important than damping. But I could be wrong.
We could try to resolve some of these issues with simple perception experiments. Happy to discuss that more if you want. Cool projects have always started with weird idea! ;-)
One thing that could help us to move fast on this is if you could find 5-10 skis from 2021-22 in the Sooth database that you feel are great and 5-10 skis that you feel are terrible. They would need to be relatively similar models (e.g., directional all mountain skis). We could then quickly see if there are some correlations between the properties that we are currently measuring and your ratings... We would not address damping, but we might find something much simpler!
You can look at these:
1. Comparative Study of Ski Damping Technologies by Accelerance Maps (https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/49/1/49)... that is super easy to do, but it is hard to figure out which part of the accelerance map is important for on-snow feels.
2. Effect of edged snow contact on the vibration of alpine skis (https://rdcu.be/cAYY7). The latest and greatest, but definitely not the end of that...