Our price reduction has more to do with Print cost savings and efficiencies than the industry decline.

Quite like MBR. Wmb is the worst out of all of them, even mountain bike action!
I can tolerate MBUK, but dirt is my favorite.

Sheer volume of cliches is getting embarrassing – “buttery smooth” is still in use, “game changing geometry”

Do bikes still corner like they’re on rails?
😉

Changing tyres on the test bikes to a “control set” instead of testing the bike as you buy it.

I reckon a monthly round up of the high (and low) lights from these boards would be a pretty good read – perhaps expanded with some additional research / ‘informed’ comment.

clubby – Member

Changing tyres on the test bikes to a “control set” instead of testing the bike as you buy it.

That’s pretty reasonable tbh- if you get an expensive bike with bad tyres, you change the tyres, you don’t go “this bike’s a 2/5” and throw it in a skip.

They did once change the tyres on a test bike then criticise the tyres they’d fitted though, that was good.

Maybe they should fit control forks and shocks then.
I do accept tyres are relatively cheap to change but on an expensive bike should you have to? That’s not really testing what’s being sold.

OK, suppose you end up with 2 similiar bikes with quality but very different tyres- one has supertacky highroller 2.5s, one has a pair of ardents. What do you end up writing in the review. “Bike 1 was more capable on the descents, bike 2 was faster”? Tyres dominate a bike’s performance, for the short time they last. And they’re a matter of taste too so changing them is commonplace anyway.

If you tested all Orange bikes with the plastic OEM conti and schwalbe shite they come shod with, they’d all get 1 out of 10. Except in MBR obviously 😉

I have read all the mags in my time. This year I cancelled my dirt subscription as it felt like Steve Jones was bullying anyone who disagreed with his opinions, and his reviews were borderline illegible. MBR is the only one I read now. They seem to have a good focus on some fairly wild trails in the features and the reviews, while they do go on about the bars a hit, are probably the best of any of the magazines. They show a lot of kit but I am a nerd and I like kit.

What MTB I found very dull, mbuk is a bit beyond me and while I am sure Singletrack is delightful if you are an ageing bloke pottering about perfectly dry trails on a fat bike or “bikepacking” or whatever the trendy word for touring is now then its great, but while I know the content isn’t like that its all a bit old man trendy for me. But I am not its target market, and I suspect that the average stw user and reader is not mbr’s target market hence the general grumblings of dislike here b

<shameless plug> I had a few words in MBR this summer (the riding wasn’t very summery, mind). You’re welcome to grab a PDF here: http://bit.ly/1rMadkk. I’d be interested in hearing feedback, good or bad.

Too much supercilious sneering for my tastes.

Dropped it about 5 years ago – think it was a jibe about singlespeeds.

It’s been several years since I’ve picked up a copy, but I always found MBR to be fairly dull and boring. The word beige sums it up for me

When I first started riding I lapped up all the gear reviews and bike reviews, but after 12 years I have all the gear and bikes I could ever need. I would like more bikes, but I will go into a bike shop if I ever get one. Is MBR aimed at newcomers and fairly newcomers?

as a recent subscriber to singletrack I really enjoyed my first issue. I had been subscribing to wmb/mbr (flipping the two periodically over the years). Singletrack actually took me more than an hour to read, had some interesting articles and the bike test was refreshing. Liked the fact that they said all three bikes in their main test (rockhopper, zaskar and marley) had merit depending on what you were looking for rather than just slating them.