Rossignol must have been mighty confident with its Carbon Alloy Matrix, for it applied this new technology up, down and sideways across its two most important product families, Experience and 7, in a moment in ski market history when most brands minimized the investments associated with widespread change.
No single ski benefited more from the addition of the Carbon Alloy Matrix (designated by the HD suffix in the product nomenclature), than the Experience 88 HD. There’s nothing about this ski it didn’t make better. It grips hard snow with more tenacity. It deflects clumps of day-old crud with more contempt. It tosses aside the occasional deflection that occurs in the belly of a 40mph GS turn, something the Olds 88 – excuse us, the old E88 – didn’t have the stuffing to resist.
Pay attention, Dear Reader, for this is one of the more significant shifts in product behavior we’ve seen in the last several years. The previous E88 had limits that might not have been perceptible to all Finesse skiers, but the 2017’s Experience 88 HD has moved the boundary over the Power skier’s horizon.
“Damper, smoother and better edge hold,” pens Pat Parraguirre, Bobo’s perennial manager and de facto mayor of Reno, capturing in 6 words what this review can’t manage to encapsulate in 300. (We could have just written, “Better,” and left it at that, but we’d be vulnerable to the charge of being “over-pithy.” Pardon the interruption.)
The trick to making any great ski is creating the impression that its pilot is suddenly more adept, more agile, more alive than on previous planks. In short, it mirrors the mannerisms of its owner without revealing his flaws. (If only such a mirror existed, imagine the lucre its owners would accrue.)
The only thing you can bollix in choosing an E88 HD is the length. Unless you wrestle sumo or stand 6’5” in your stocking feet, you don’t need the 188cm. “It does whatever you want it to do,” coos Matt from Footloose, one of our most talented testers, adding, as ought to apply to any AME all-star, “it goes just about anywhere.”