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There are plenty of styles of snowboarding, and as a result, plenty of styles of snowboard. There is more to take into account than just the visual appearance, despite this often taking a large precedence in your decision making. Finding the ultimate board for you can prove to be a tough challenge so we are here to discuss and break down the terminology, jargon and technical aspects of what each type of snowboard does.
Setting a baseline
Let's start with a board that falls nicely into a neutral starting point, and offers great versatility, the Nidecker Sensor. The Nidecker Sensor is a true twin board which means it is entirely symmetrical both in shape and internal construction, and allows you to ride the board exactly the same whichever way it is pointing.
This board further expands its versatile design with a Camber rocker profile, and without going too deep at this point (we will be taking a closer look at rocker and camber profiles), the Camrock profile offers a best of both worlds between the control of a camber profile and the playfulness and float of a rocker profile. This board has a medium stiffness rating which again allows you to vary your riding style for what you want to be doing on the mountain. There are plenty more features of this board available to read on our store website but another nice included feature on this board is the inclusion of a recommended stance and a QR code with setup and tips for this board.
What about rocker and camber profiles?
Recent snowboard design incorporates a large variation of camber and rocker profiles with each version designed to focus on a different style of riding. We have put these into 4 major groups to help alleviate some of the strain of sifting through each company’s camber profile names and provide you with a more simple to understand and intuitive system, let’s take a look at those now, and break down what each profile does and provide some examples.
Camber
Let’s start with the true Camber layout, which arguably offers the most performance across the mountain, but also can be slightly harder to achieve the maximum result from. This profile has its main contact points set far away from your feet to provide more stability and more consistent edge contact. This allows the board to be good for high speeds and have impressive manoeuvrability. As well as this, camber board design means it can easily store and unload energy, greatly helping with pop for freestyle applications. Camber boards lend themselves to big speed and big air, making them a great choice for freestyle and piste riding. A couple of key examples here are:
Burton Custom A continually popular and staple board with a traditional camber profile, loved by riders for its versatility and performance.
Capita Dark Horse A new series of board from Capita designed to offer a solid entry point into freestyle without breaking the bank.
Multi-Camber
Possibly the most interesting profile here, multi-camber boards offer unique qualities that make them stand-out fun in certain situations. At Snowtrax, we have banded multi-camber as 2 performance styles, high and low, depending on the board specifically.
Low performance, typically more rocker or v-shape based boards, offer plenty of forgiveness and fun in their handling characteristics, as well as easy turn initiation and great float in powder, this makes these types of board great for playful mountain experience and jibbing small park features such as boxes, pipes and rails.
High performance boards offer more unique rocker profiles and even offer triple camber designs, and provides something akin to a best of both worlds deal, where you have decent edge hold and turn initiation, as well as great float in powder, but may lose on some of the playfulness found in more v-shaped style boards.
A good example of a playful and fun multicamber board is a Lib Tech T.Rice Pro which features a very distinctive v-shape profile loved by its riders for versatile and playful behaviour for having serious fun all over the mountain
For a more performance oriented multi-camber board take a look at the Never Summer V-Twin which offers triple camber technology for serious edge hold and the ability to dominate the mountain on any day in any place.
Flat Rocker
Flat Rocker boards provide a combination of performance aspects from camber and multi-camber board, and are more often aimed at progressing or gentle riders. They offer the forgiving nature of multicamber and stability of camber without leaning too far in any one direction. Like multi-camber boards they offer great float in powder as well as better behaviour for jibbing and small park features, and then like camber boards they provide a strong sense of stability and edge hold for use on conventional piste settings. Flat Rocker boards offer a little bit of everything, but may not offer as much of that as another profile can, for instance, they offer good pop for an ollie, but more often than not a camber board will be able to offer a little more, however this shouldn’t discount that they will offer possibilities that other profiles are not designed for as well. A good example of a flat rocker board is:
The Burton Cultivator, new for this year, offers riders the chance to progress their riding skills with a forgiving and stylish looking board, with the Burton Channel system offering a great link for board feel.
Camber Rocker
The last profile we have to discuss is Camber Rocker, which is set out to offer a best of both worlds of performance taken from both camber and multicamber style boards. Compared to a camber board the contact points are brought much closer to your feet and the rockered tip and tail is more exaggerated. This creates a blend of camber oriented performance and edge hold for hard charging and control, as well as good pop, and playfulness and float in powder, making these boards impressively versatile across the entire mountain.
Camber Rocker is widely considered as one of the most popular profiles thanks to its wide versatility and general accessibility without majorly limiting performance. We mentioned the Nidecker Sensor earlier, and this board falls nicely into this category, but another board to take a look at is the Capita Ultrafear, besides the seriously cool name, the Ultrafear delivers bountiful and playful versatility across the mountain and will allow you to have fun by the bucket load.
True Twin, or not True Twin?
Now we have a better understanding of our camber profiles, and you can assess which one might be best suited to you, we can take a look at the long standing debate of whether you really do need a true twin board. There are arguments both for and against them and it largely revolves around one question: Do you ever really ride switch? While it’s true that technically any snowboard can be ridden in any direction, there is no doubt that true twin boards are purpose built to be ridden in both directions, which often makes them far more popular in freestyle circles for landing jumps that end in half of a full rotation, leaving the rider to proceed with their other foot forward. When designers look beyond the scope of true twin boards, they can really open their horizons on directional board design, which allows for the introduction of all sorts of directional features, such as softer or shorter tails for powder and freeride, different materials in the front of the board versus the rear, and redesigned sidecuts and profile shapes that all lean in one direction: forwards.
Let’s take a brief look at a directional board and how it may differ from our Nidecker Sensor that we talked about earlier. We will talk about the Never Summer Valhalla, with its bold directional shape and styling, this board features a wider and longer nose, as well as a shorter and more narrow tail, allowing for great turning and float characteristics, as well as a 1 inch setback that changes how you transfer energy though the board and offers more control and turn initiation ability. Without arguing which board is outright better than the other we can see that each board offers its own qualities but also how a purpose built directional board can improve on some aspects of mountain riding but at the sacrifice of some others, and this is largely what we consider when choosing a true twin or not true twin board, whether we want that extra little bit of ability to ride switch as easily as we ride forward, and have more access to freestyle elements, or whether we want to turn that dial down to 1 and focus more on other aspects of riding.
Soft or Stiff?
With our ever gaining knowledge of snowboard variety, no doubt by now that the most burning question you have is about snowboard stiffness, this largely falls down to user preference but there are certain qualities and benefits for each end of the scale. Let’s start with soft and work our way up:
Soft boards offer very flexible and playful characteristics which often work best in park, street and jibbing, this gives you a board that is easy to turn and have a lot of fun with, but can be limited in terms of top end performance. A great example of this type of flex is the Salomon Sleepwalker, similarly to the Nidecker Sensor, it is a Camber Rocker true twin board, with the biggest difference between the two from a functionality standpoint being the stiffness. The Sleepwalker is a remarkably soft board beloved by riders for the seemingly endless ability to pull off whacky, technical and thrilling jib manoeuvres, but loses out on the versatility of the Sensor.
In the middle unsurprisingly we find medium stiffness boards, and this is where our Nidecker Sensor sits. Medium flex boards, as you may have guessed, are versatile and balanced in their nature without being exceedingly strong in any one area. We don’t need to go too in depth here so we will quickly move on to…
Stiff boards, which are all about delivering power, stability and precise riding, these are your go to choice for something fast and aggressive, but they can be a bit of a handful to control. By the laws of physics themselves a stiffer board will give you increased pop thanks to requiring more energy to deform. Let’s take a look at the Capita Mega Mercury as our discussional stiff board. The Mercury uses a slightly different camber profile to the Sensor and is a little more directional, but the primary difference we are focusing on here is the stiffness, which allows the Mercury to chase much more high speed and high energy, however it does sacrifice a little in terms of freedom and playfulness versus the Sensor.
A wrap up
On this journey we have taken a Nidecker Sensor and compared it to a wide variety of boards to see how different characteristics affect the core fundamentals of snowboard handling. There is still more to discuss yet but we should stop here for a brief conclusion of our previous talking points. It is worth mentioning that each board is good in its own way and this blog is not meant to cast any negative light on any particular snowboard but instead highlight what can make different boards unique and what characteristics you should look for when choosing your own board. Before we finish this blog for good it is worth discussing some other less impacting technical features that affect a board’s behaviour.
Volume Shifters
A volume shifter board, for instance a Salomon Dancehaul or a Ride Warpig trades length for width, these boards are meant to be ridden intentionally short and can provide a more fun and playful board compared to a similar non volume shifting board.
Sidecuts
Different brands will use different sidecuts, and some will even use special sidecut technology, for instance Lib Tech and their Magne-Traction system, which is a wavy serrated edge designed for cutting into hard snow and providing better grip. A sidecut will have somewhat of a performance effect on your board but is almost always not a decisive factor as it is designed to work for that intended board. Some boards like the Ride Warpig even feature an asymmetrical sidecut that helps your confidence on heel or toeside (depending on which foot forward you are).
Mounting System
Some boards do feature a mounting system that deviates from the usual 4x4 we commonly find, Burton offers their Channel system which does improve board feel under your feet and give you more control over where you place your bindings. Most bindings will now include discs that have options to mount on either 4x4 or Channel setups.
Setback
We have briefly discussed setback a couple of times in this blog and it would be wrong not to include it here, setback means that the recommended mounting points on the board are set away from the centre of the board and shifted towards the rear of the board. While it is possible to reconfigure your binding setup to sit over the centre of the board and eliminate the setback, it’s worth bearing in mind that the designers of these boards have intentionally made the board to work with the intended setback to get the best performance from it.
Design
To some people this can be the most deciding factor of them all, but it’s not worth putting a board down because it doesn’t look exactly the way you want it to, after all, if you ride it a lot you can expect at least some wear and tear, and also, stickers are commonplace among snowboarders, get creative!