Shimano's New Power Meters, 2nd Gen Dura-Ace R9200 and Ultegra R8100

Equipment
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I have noticed that with trainers, too. Even the players (Wahoo, Tacx/Garmin, Elite) with years and years of experience often still ship units with issues, which are then fixed over time. I’m not sure why, especially when some of the units seem like minor, iterative updates of existing products.

That’s encouraging to hear, sounds like roadies who prefer Shimano have another solid choice to measure power.

Hmmm, I don’t think it is that easy. There are certainly products where the manufacturer needs to rev the firmware a few times to iron out issues. But there are other issues, which are fixed during mass production, that manufacturers should not run into. An established manufacturer should not run into issues when iterating over a trainer they have been making for years and years. Even if the outside is new, the core components and competency should be there to avoid obvious issues. Yet, Tacx/Garmin, Wahoo and Elite all had issues with their newly released trainers during Covid. Those are issues they should have caught during internal testing. Or they should not have happened in the first place, given their experience in the segment.

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But that is EXACTLY why they need to open testing to others, MANY others, that can do the testing that the manufacturers didn’t think of, or didn’t spend the time to identify. It would be ideal if, say Garmin, bought a bunch of competing products and tested their products against them, but that takes time, and why should they spend the money when others can do that testing.

I’m sure that the manufacturers rely on independent testers do to the expertise they bring and the ruthless quest to find out if the shiny new thing really has a shine, or if it’s just PR BS.

I’m sure that it is often ‘just that way’. Products have been released that ‘weren’t all together’, and some have suffered for it. (Woop is probably an exception, but I never thought their band had much of a future (reminded me so much of the Nike Fuel Band))

The 2T had a ‘troubled birth’, and the Wahoo Kickr too. Garmin power pedals have a rich history of issues. Independent testers/evaluators found the issues with the Shimano cranksets.

Too much stuff is shrouded in PR smoke and mirrors and the manufacturers are allergic to serious looks at the ‘rubber hits the road’ scenario, and I steer clear (as much as I can) from them.

I value the input of people like @DCRainmaker and @gpl. They seem to be willing to offend major brands by pointing out they need to do more work on their products. I cam from the IT industry, and was astounded at the amount of PR BS that would be ladled onto the ‘new hotness’, and it was really just polished road apples with a urinal cake under it. New processors that were polished to a blinding sheen, and they were SLOWER than the one they replaced, etc… I do not trust ‘market speak’, and PR nonsense. I value the independent evaluator/testers. Keep up the work of keeping industry sane and accurate.

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You should not abuse customers are quality control. I’m speaking of issues that should have been caught early on, and which might not be obvious to customers when they get the product new. Specifically, I am thinking of premature wear issues where a certain component only lasts months as opposed to many years or the lifetime of the product. The other class of problems is QC control during production, which is also not an issue customers can fix.

With the prices companies ask of e. g. trainers, I think we ought to expect better. If you price them as premium products, such things are no longer excusable.

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cough Wahoo Kickr cough

EDIT: And are DCRainmaker and GPLama customers? I think they are on a level somewhere above that. But, even I have found issues with shipped products from the ‘big name’ vendors. I had a 2T that the entire bottom was covered with cracks and chip pits because the ‘new plastic’ wasn’t up to the riding of a rabid and locked down lab rat that found nothing else better to do than abuse himself on it. I was shocked to see chunk of that beautiful blue plastic shoot across the room, and horrified to see the destruction on the bottom. Wow… :man_shrugging: I’ve killed more smart bikes than most people, I think. (Not that I’ve ever compared the destruction)

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Not just Wahoo, it was all of the high-end trainer manufacturers. I think the only training bike without issues was Stages’. I remember reading one horror story on this forum where one member went through 6 or 7 Tacx/Garmin bikes. He then switched to a Wahoo and was “happy” that he only needed to have it replaced once or twice. This is nuts. And given that shipping even a trainer is expensive and an ordeal, it isn’t something that can be fixed very easily.

Sometimes. When @gpl purchases a Shimano power meter at retail, he is a regular customer. @dcrainmaker often buys power meters and watches at retail after sending back the review unit. I don’t remember him mentioning that the product he got as a customer was ever substantially different from a hardware perspective than what he got to test.

Even when they get early hardware, I think most manufacturers know their deal: they cannot be bribed/threatened with ads/withdrawing ad spending. Their reputation is worth much more and if your product sucks, they will say so on video and repeatedly. Smaller manufacturers on average seem more eager to benefit from their experience testing power meters.

They do have ways to contact manufacturers that most people don’t, but even that doesn’t seem to help them with all of them. Some manufacturers seem eager and very reactive to their feedback while others like Shimano don’t seem to do anything in particular with their feedback. (Of course, if I am wrong here, they should correct me, but that’s been my impression from watching/reading their reviews.)

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I lost count of the Kickr bikes I went through, and am on my possibly 4th Neo Smart. Not all of the Kickr failures were because of the bike, a couple of them were damaged in shipping leading me to believe they really need better packaging.

The last issue with a Neo Smart was the hub nearly completely failed on a ‘new’ bike that has shocked me. (The pawls were extremely rusted, and there was very little lubrication (obviously) in the hub/disc area. The replacement was solid, and I added a bit more grease, working it into the pawls JIC.

Yes, we should expect more, but the fact that some of the Kickr’s have had zero issues, and some have completely failed is disturbing. Inconsistent and poor engineering is the history of Wahoo trainers with thousands of previous owners dumping their Wahoo stuff. Sad… (Yes, I am looking at a Stages bike as a replacement, but it’s so much like a spin bike. I had a Lemond spin bike, and tried to make it a smart trainer. It was bullet proof and would have made an excellent smart trainer, but hit wall after wall, sadly. They used a Bluetooth console and had the data encrypted, and wouldn’t help people prolong the life of their bikes)

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Here’s an example. Consider this archived version (late 2022) of road.cc’s review of the R9200-P. The reviewer wrote:

The Shimano R9200-P data has been perfectly consistent for me. Okay, it reads higher than the Garmin Rally pedals and a little lower than the Tacx Neo 2, but quite consistently so, and we can’t say for certain which is closest to the true power output. There have been no data dropouts, no weird spikes or troughs on the graphs, and the result is that I’d be happy to train using the data…
Shimano’s Dura-Ace R9200-P power meter is a much improved design that delivers consistent power, cadence and L/R balance data that is perfectly usable for daily training…

This was despite noting some discrepancies from the power measured by a smart trainer and a pair of Rally PM pedals. Later on, the article got updated, and the conclusion now has the sentence:

Shimano’s Dura-Ace R9200-P power meter appeared to deliver consistent data, but was overreading quite a lot compared to a comparison power meter.

This was not a good review. However, I don’t know that I blame the reviewer necessarily. I don’t know how long he’s worked with comparative power meter reviews. I don’t know that he knows how to stress test the meter to highlight weaknesses. What I do know is that GPLama’s and DC’s reviews read very differently: the R9200-P is not consistent, and it is not worth buying. The road.cc guy doesn’t appear to have detected the drifting zero, or the large/small chainring issues (albeit these are issues that I think modern PMs have solved - so why is Shimano having this issue IDK).

As a side note, if you have one PM that is consistent but not accurate, then I agree that it’s potentially ok for training. But a) some would disagree, b) I would not pay about a US$650 premium over the Dura Ace crank for the privilege of a PM that’s consistent but not accurate, c) it is a very bad look when Shimano’s native PM for its flagship groupset is not accurate, even if it is consistent.

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These are all caveats that should lead a reviewer to NOT review a product. If you don’t know how to test a specific product, then don’t test it. Otherwise your “review” is useless.

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If it were only Wahoo, then I could solve the issue by moving to another manufacturer. But it is unfortunately all of them who messed up recently. I’m glad I have a power meter and don’t need to rely on my Suito’s power numbers. Initially, its power numbers matched that of my Quarq within a few W. But now both have different slopes, ugh.

The Stages bike is definitely the most boring. But Stages has manufactured gym bikes for other companies for years and years and years. They are very good at it. Their experience shows as I have not heard as many horror stories about the Stages bike than about Wahoo’s or Tacx’s.

If I were you, I’d be super pee’d off, you have spent serious €€€€ and the failures seem to suggest it is QC amateur hour over in the factories.

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No,

Otherwise your review is MARKETING.

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What pee’d me off was being told repeatedly that the one brand ‘simulated a real bike on real rides’, and it DID NOT! I was having a problem with the shifting between gears making HUGE jumps. Like, working through the ‘gears’ from 1 to 22, it seemed like the ‘bike’ was increasing the ‘gear’, and adding a rather large multiplier. 1 to 2 was a jump, 2 to 3, 11 to 12, and 19 to 20 was a ball breaking workout. I could not reach 22. It was immobile. I threw my ‘real bike’ on a Tacx 2T ‘accurate trainer’, and went through the ‘gears’, and got to 22 and my brain wasn’t about to leap from my skull. I did the same route on Zwift, starting from the same spot. If they were even remotely simulating the ‘same thing’ wouldn’t logic dictate that they would be able to be ridden the same? I even presented graphs from DCRainmaker’s analysis website, and after over a week of hearing nothing, made the statement that it does not simulate a ‘normal bike’ all of a sudden, and that if they continue to state that, and refuse to fix it or acknowledge there is a problem, that I would like my money back. A couple of days later, I received an email asking me for my paypal account, and they would be arranging the usual boxes to send the bike back to a different company, hopefully for a postmortem examination. (Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining)

So far I have liked the second brand, but this last ‘new bike’ has given me cause to wonder… It was in a new and single sealed box, with dust covering it. And the ‘hub’ was filled with rust and failed curing a high watt demand interval and my knee did contact the end of the bars. (No injury, but beside the point) I can only assume that everything is great since I haven’t heard from them since I sent the pictures (except for a ‘Wow!’ and thank you for sending such detailed pictures in).

I have told people, who I thought could be stretching to buy a smart bike, to save their money (get a Peloton instead). I wasn’t a huge fan of ‘wheel-off bike trainers’, but riding outside is a PITA. I almost hate that more than riding a broken trainer. The drama of a group ride, the getting dropped, the viscous conversations that go on, the sexism, the elitism, the ‘helpful’ snide suggestions. True, they weren’t al like that, but the ones that were made me wonder why I even showed up. And all the whining racer-wannabes and their carping and bitching and, well, whining.

The biggest elephant in the room is that so much of the trainers are proprietary! You need their parts, you need their boards, their power supplies, their belts and chains. Sometimes you need their bolts too, and their ‘special service tools’ to even begin to find out how proprietary that wonder of planned obsolescence is.

Wow, sorry this turned into such a vent. Yikes…

But at one point, I had a broken smart bike in my living room, one that was limping along in my ‘pain cave’ and one on the way to replace it. When I read that Wahoo was having money issues, I almost felt guilty for having so many needing to be replaced, but how long can you ride a broken trainer. My wife was ‘YOU PAID HOW MUCH FOR THAT?!?! AND YOU CAN’T RIDE IT!!! ARE YOU INSANE? There has to be a better system!’. There SHOULD be a better system. I thought the computer and networking industries were messed up, but it’s an epidemic across many industries. (But still, does the guy that ordered one at the same time I did really ever ride it?)

And for those that haven’t had any issues with their stuff, I’m in awe. Good for you! I certainly didn’t want to have the problems I experienced. I’m glad the vendors stood behind their products and they were innovative and fun, but quality just wasn’t there.

Ride on!

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I think I avoided the Stages because in my mind I thought it was too like the Peloton. Well, that , or what I could have done with the Lemond spin bike I had. I hated declaring defeat and selling that thing. It was bulletproof, and stable, and so quiet. Hmm… I could try to sell my new and repaired trainer and see if I get enough money for it.

Behold, as a wild ass in the desert, go I forth to my work.

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Not really, because you could just as well end up being unfairly negative about the product as unfairly positive. It’s not at all unusual to see commenters under road.cc reviews lambasting the reviewer for marking a product down for details they feel are irrelevant to its quality, a foible of the reviewer, etc.

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True, but the context of the quote I referenced was about reviewers not knowing much, or anything, about a product and still writing a public review. It often ends up positive, but can be negative, and either way is marketing. I pity the people that make decisions on one or just a couple reviews. Even review websites are famous (infamous) for deliberate positive or incendiary negative reviews. Sometimes readers can tell they don’t have a clue about what they are reviewing. Sometimes it’s like reading manuals and you get the idea that the people that made it, or wrote it, had absolutely nothing to do with the manual. That happens all to frequently.

And beware the ‘social media influencer’. So driven to get paid, they will say almost literally anything.

But, yeah. I’m old enough to remember the blistering review by Gene Shalit of the movie ‘Children of a Lesser God’. It was brutal, scorching, take no prisoners kind of knee capping with a sledge hammer. Then people saw the movie. Oops…

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We also shouldn’t underestimate how similar these two can be, and how they are becoming more so every day. Traditional publications aren’t just competing with each other anymore, they’re being forced to compete with the influencers more and more all the time.

There are more cogs and safeguards in the reviewer machine than the influencer one, but I think the pressures are ultimately the same. Reviewer’s editor has a shrinking budget so can’t retain enough writers to have really detailed expertise in all the various subjects they’ve got to cover. They’ve got to rely on generalists who can get away with a huge variety of subjects without being experts in any, and crucially, who write engaging (rather than purely informative) content. That means if a reviewer wants to stay in a job they’ve got to accept a wider scope than they might choose for themselves, so they don’t necessarily have the freedom to take a ‘pass’ on an assignment that’s not their thing. They’re probably also under constant pressure to increase the amount of content they generate per hour of time they put into their research and testing.

In theory a freelance reviewer working for similar publications should have the freedom of project selection that the employee reviewer doesn’t have, but in practice I’d be surprised if any of them has enough offers coming in to be able to afford knocking back the ones they don’t love.

Influencer is effectively just a self-publishing freelancer. Or an editor that does their own writing? It used to be possible to dismiss the influencer based on a lack of credentials, but now all the ad revenue is based on clicks and engagement figures which are driven almost exclusively by social media algorithms rather than search engine rankings (or, before that, newsstand distributors). That means an engaging yahoo can blow the doors off the numbers of a curated publication, and in turn, the publication has to start thinking more like an influencer.

I doubt it’s ever as sinister as ‘we better say good things or Shimano will pull their advertising,’ though that’s fundamentally what’s happening. There may well be an unwritten editorial understanding that emphatically extreme (positive or negative) reviews generate more engagement than balanced ones. Perhaps also a no-legal-risk sense of ‘don’t say anything negative unless it’s either subjective or you’re 100% sure you have the data to back it up.’ I’d be shocked if it went any deeper than that though.

I’m aiming my blame at the social-media stranglehold over the way we find and access content rather than any reviewer or cycling publication.

Strangely, I think Ray and Shane are actually the disruptors here. When I first found Ray’s content it seemed like primarily written text, and over the years he’s adapted to become a youtube/social brand as well without sacrificing any of his integrity or rigour (or even replacing/reducing the written text!) He has responded to all those changing pressures without watering down his core offering, which is remarkable. Similar for Shane, though he started a bit later and so was youtube-native from the beginning. (I hope I’m not misremembering their history here, but however it unfolded I think they’ve both done an incredible thing in an environment of pretty extreme pressure.)

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Social media has definitely warped the world. There are so many people that are literally flapping their gums, know-nothing, earnest appearing people, hoping to make it while being lazy and subservient to their perceived audience and their ‘fame’. So many take themselves far to seriously for the intellectual effort and honesty they put into their bleatings.

Given how ‘social media’ (FB) started, it’s no wonder it’s such a cesspool, and some of the worst are rising to the top. I quit FB, and Twitter because the ‘juice to squeeze’ ratio wasn’t there. Flame wars over the silliest things! And just looking at YouTube, the amount of serious garbage there and the number of people that believe it is embarrassing and detrimental to society and any future that the collective we live in might have.

I’ve seen videos where the speaker appears to not be very sure of what they are talking about, and haven’t done the homework. And tons of ‘know nothings’ that have multiple accounts and spew their garbage way too far. Yeah, Dura Ace is shiny and yeah, it’s expensive, and yeah people seeking ‘the look’ and some amount of perceived ‘respect’ will flaunt it, and some people will polish the image of it so that it’s a rare person who will call out the flaws and poor execution of the bling device they place their opinions on in hopes of some sheen of relevance.

But that wheat to chaff quality of reviews isn’t a new thing, it’s just far more wide spread than before. Pre-social media, I would read market centric publications and could see the shameless amount of self-serving self-promotion. And just look at Amazon! People ‘reviewing’ items that aren’t even available yet. People slamming items, and some vendors recruiting people (or doing it themselves) to post fawning reviews that are just ridiculous. And it extends to online ‘rating’ sites that are flooded with garbage reviews, and attempted attacks on the reviewed providers.

That’s why I sought out people who I believe do tell the truth, they spend time with the product, use the product, and don’t get involved in reviewing products they don’t use for their personal entertainment/hobbies/occupation.

DC Rainmaker, GPLama, and Hambini are people/sites that I visit. All are willing to call a spade a spade, and work to perforate the PR sheen.

I think of the Whoop band. I was curious about it, and did some basic research, and was shocked at the amount of negative reviews I saw, and yet the Whoop cloud had thousands of people carrying their flag. Even people I rode with were on the evangelistic bandwagon. Finding people who had tried it and had some level of self respect was difficult. Then I found DC, and then found others who called it for what it was. I was astounded that it was so popular, and so controversial. (I had a Nike Fuel Band back in the day, and wondered what reality it was using to function. No one seemed to know)

People have said that we are living in a fact free future’, and that to me is horrific. Opinions are not facts, and the louder you shout your opinions seems to get you more attention, but at the cost of deluding people finding their ‘content’ and angering scads of people burned by their ‘reviews’, and opinions displayed as facts.

I hope the three I mentioned, and all of the others who hold their self respect over flash-in-the-pan fame can continue to help consumers make better decisions.

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I suspect it is even more complicated. My brother worked the biggest German gaming publisher as a freelancer. His boss would sometimes send review drafts to the company (which was also an advertiser), and my boss forced my brother to at least soften his tone in a few places and up the score for a product. He was a freelancer, and pushing back too hard might mean he wouldn’t be commissioned the next big piece on GTA or the new Doom. It also means he wasn’t paid very well. Another way to pressure publications was to ask for testing hardware back very aggressively. For several reasons, the magazine relied on hardware they have received for review (the latest and greatest) so that they could test the new game on different hardware. It seems that the companies consider review hardware as disposable, so very often they don’t even want them back. “In a year it’ll be worth nothing anyway.” was the thinking apparently. But if you piss off a company, they’d aggressively ask for their hardware back.

Finding and keeping knowledgable reviewers is extremely hard. It isn’t a coincidence that there are few people who have the knowledge and experience to review power meters. A publication like road.cc couldn’t afford @dcrainmaker and @gpl, and that’s not meant as a ding against road.cc. I have no inside knowledge, but if I had to guess I’d say they are trying their best on a shoestring budget. Keeping advertisers happy is par for the course. Having unreasonable deadlines is part of the mix. As is employing people who might not have the necessary experience.

If Shimano can force many of the pro teams to use their power meter, I reckon they can force publications to not be overly critical either. And it seems to work. Even the owner of my LBS who is really plugged into the Japanese cycling scenery hadn’t heard of that. So Shimano’s PR team did its job.

In the computing world, very few publications do proper testing, because that is very expensive. E. g. just measuring noise levels properly is not easy and requires and anechoic chamber. Who can afford that? Who can set up the experiments?

In other industries that does happen.

Another thing is when you receive tech for review. A bad review might push you down further the totempole and you might not be able to publish the new 12-speed GRX review when everybody else does.

AFAIK at least Ray is also offering his services to companies (including, I think, investment companies). Some “influencers” do this, companies hire them if they want an honest opinion on their products and their strategy.

Although there are many shades of gray, some are straight up doing product videos. E. g. Ian Cutress, formerly high-up at Anandtech, has done that and I don’t like it. Yes, the sponsored videos are clearly marked, but IMHO they go too far. (He calls them whitepaper videos, I think.)

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My wife came up with the idea that I should ‘consult’ with the smart bike companies that I have had experience with by killing their products. I said ‘Sure, that would last about a week.’ Yeah, those companies know what’s wrong, and are not fixing it because they don’t want to pay to fix it if they think they won’t lose enough customers. I mean, you can speak truth to power, but only as long as power thinks what you have to say might prove to be beneficial to them in the long, and potentially short run.

I mean, if anyone at those companies looked at the people that returned their products for replacement, and looked at the incoming products, they would damn well know what the problem is, and would likely have a really good idea what they need to do to fix it. But they will play the Monte Carlo Simulations until they all come up really bad.

For those not realizing it, there are departments and highly paid people that spend their time calculating how much stiffing a customer with a poorly designed and manufactured item will cost them in repeat/new customers, in bad reviews, and in the courts if it comes to that. If their ‘experts’ believe that dropping a dozen capacitors from a design will save them $900,000 over 5 years, they will cling to that to save the money, until reality says that it’s actually costing them x times that. So to throw some product at a lightweight nobody on social media to get a glowing review, many will do that. Some believe in ‘exposure’, and will be happy with a positive review, but won’t own the disaster their dropping a dozen capacitors from the design caused.

So paying for reviews, paying for positive reviews, becomes a necessity to drive more customers into their game. Sure, some people that buy their product don’t use it enough, so the chances of a failure is less, but for people that really ‘abuse’ them ironically by actually using them, they are often sucked in until they get tired of it and toss it and go with something else. But that is in their calculations. It’s such a game.

Sometimes they have to do a 0.x rev on a product because their people say adding only 5 capacitors will fix the poorly designed circuit and result in less of them failing. Eventually people that have replacements failing for that issue will by chance get an updated refurbished board and likely not have it fail again. Eventually… So they will pump refurbished product into their warranty base hoping that one of the replacements won’t totally blow up and cost them more money.

Sorry that this seems like a rant, but I was burned by a vendor recently and this has been building for a while.

/rant

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I didn’t seem to get a clear answer on this, and if it is already answered I apologize.

I am thinking about giving R8100 a shot on a Tarmac SL6 I have sitting in my garage that has virtually 250 miles on it (PM if you are interested in the complete R8020 groupset).

The question is, I want to run a 1x setup on this bike. I am not here to debate this, my primary road bike has been a 48 x 10/33 and its flat out perfect for me and where I live.

The question I have, can i run a Sram 10/33 cassette on the di2 system or are the ratios/cassette gaps to different? Is it a chain issue?

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I just realized that Shimano has a 11/34 12spd cassette, a 50 x 11/34 I guess is close enough. Im still curious to hear the answer though.

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So you would have a Shimano crankset but everything else is SRAM? Shimano road cranksets are not available in a 1x configuration. You can do it by installing a single chainring from someone like Wolftooth, but it isn’t really made for it. I did this conversion on my wife’s bike with an R8000 crankset, but it required some filing (Wolftooth has instructions to do it).

But if you already have a SRAM crankset and want power, it would be a lot cheaper and easier to put a Power2Max on the chainring and you are done.