I'd talked with the Augment reps at this SIA and the previous one also, and had really liked what I'd heard: top skis from a company with a great racing ski background, an intriguing semi-custom approach in offering different ski flexes, and ski prep and finish above any ski available to the general public at this time, starting with race skis.
I too had read those glowing reviews, and was hoping for great things, at the end of a day skiing on many really wonderful new skis.
On old snow days, I usually tend to prefer a ski with a bias towards carving, and like that sort of ski off piste also, to a large extent. So I figured I was a candidate to appreciate the AM 77. (I'd thought the first ski of the day for me, the Stockli AR, might be a similar type of ski to the Augment AM 77, perhaps a good comparison. Nope.)
My first impressions were of disappointment with the edgehold in working the ski in a normal way, adapting to what that ski did. At the same time, there was an unusual, neat underlying flex, carve quality and precision there, tantalizing. I don't want that type of ski to slip or slarve a bit with most turns
unless I'm careful - unless I want the ski to do that, and it's by choice. So that particular ski at that flex, in end of day, old snow conditions, was just okay, even though these were conditions one might guess a frontside biased ski, or a ski with a race background pedigree, might excel at. It took extra work, and caution, to keep that ski performing as a result, and the results weren't all that great: follow the carve/flex the ski liked and offered, feel it slip out, next time use more caution and find the point where the slip wouldn't happen. (Was the flex for someone heavier than me? But the flex seemed a bit too soft, actually. Was the problem the tune or tune deterioration? Don't know. But for me, frontside bias skis can be carved hard all day long and lose almost nothing of their edgehold or carve ability.)
Relatively speaking, I'd been on a long list of amazing carvers that day already (see the list in order skied), and my next pair, an Augment Masters type GS ski, was also so much the opposite of the AM 77 that day, so perfect a carver/flex for me, that the contrast was pretty obvious, and relative weakness of the All Mountain 77 became even more apparent, for my particular skiing at least.