Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Abstract:
So far this has been a big, solid and pretty fun-to-use machine at a relatively good price. DO NOT take any deals on used equipment offered by Smooth. A 10% discount is too small to justify the potential headaches. I had major problems with the purchase and initial mechanical failure of a used machine, which cannot be returned for refund.
Article:
I relied heavily on reviews like this one when I decided to buy my first elliptical trainer -- in fact my first exercise machine of any type -- so I'm hoping to return the favor.
When I started my search, I was drawn to the brand names I had seen in the gym, namely Life Fitness and Precor. I loved the way the gym elliptical got my heart rate up and my body moving without the pounding to my (overweight and out of shape) body I got on a treadmill. I was addicted.
I knew the machines were expensive, but was still not prepared for the sticker shock when I saw what even used Life Fitness machines cost - between 3 and 5K. At the same time, I knew for sure I wanted the feeling of gliding almost weightless on a big sturdy machine, not cranking on a man-sized eggbeater from Wal-Mart.
After some searching I came across Smooth. The consumer and trade-publication reviews I read were very positive in terms of the construction and design of the machine and by extension the quality of the workout. In choosing the non-consumer reviews I relied on (or put differently, avoiding scam reviews that might have been somehow 'influenced') I sought sites that immediately acknowledged the industry leaders I had been priced out of - Life Fitness and Precor in particular. If a review began by saying "Life Fitness is the absolute best you can get - IF you can afford it", and *then* went on to praise another brand on its cost/quality merits, I figured I was in the right place.
Smooth Fitness was generally well-liked by these reviewers; they were also generally pretty adamant about the fact that buying an elliptical machine priced less than $500 dollars was at best a gamble, at worst a rip. The better idea, they said, was to sink that money in a long-term investment (ie pony up the bigger bucks). I weigh 220 pounds and like to jump around on the pedals while listening to 200 bpm techno -- something made of plastic wasn't going to cut it. So I took their advice and chose to 'invest'.
The reviews I read kept coming back to one theme with the Smooth brand: machines that aimed for gym-quality construction based on sound design principles, offered at consumer-level prices, between $1000 and $2000. They said Smooth was an online-only vendor selling directly to the consumer, which in principle is one thing that allowed for the lower prices (as opposed to, say, cheap materials or shoddy workmanship). Since that initial research I learned that - if I understand correctly - Smooth machines are also sold under another brand name through more traditional outlets such as actual retail stores. I believe the other brand is 'EVO', and that the machines appear to be identical, just with different stickers on them. More about this in a minute...
All of this appealed to me - I was willing to pay twice as much or more for a studly machine that would last 10 years as opposed to 10 months. I'm a young-ish consumer who isn't afraid to conduct business over the internet, and the positive sense I got of the Smooth machines seems to have outweighed my natural desire to try a thing out before buying. It was at this point that I tried filling the experience-gap with actual consumer reviews, and started learning about the scatter-plot effect of unsolicited reviews...
Mostly people said it was a decent machine that ran well at the right price. But there were weird spikes in the data - one guy was homicidally furious about bad customer service and a machine that didn't work. One guy said he had turned the resistance all the way up and it still was pretty easy. A woman complained that her stance on the machine was giving her knee trouble. Ultimately I looked for the median in all this, and it seemed positive. Being an impulse-buyer, I was on the phone a short time later.
And this is where the one down side - and a pretty big one frankly - to the purchasing experience began. I got on the phone with a salesman. By which I mean a guy who wanted to sell me something - specifically something more expensive than what I was trying to buy to begin with. The story:
At the time of my purchase (January 2008), there were three levels of Smooth trainer that seemed potentially right for me: the CE 2.1, CE 3.2 and the CE 7.4. As the naming system implies, these are all in roughly the same family, with a higher number meaning a more robust machine. As the numbering implies, the 2.1 and 3.2 are very similar, with the jump to 7.4 being a bigger step up. You can read all about these machines at http://www.smoothfitness.com/ellipticals-machines/index.htm
As I said, I'm overweight and out of shape. You don't get that way being the kind of person who just has to get some exercise every day. Sure, I was jonesing for that good elliptical rush and wanted to be able to roll out of bed and get it without the struggle of getting to the gym. You can see that I live in constant oscillation between compulsion and sloth. I was sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge in the end that I was not likely to be on this thing every day, no matter how much I wanted to believe I would be. In any case, the top-end 7.4 was rated by the company as potentially able to endure use by multiple people on a daily basis (ie gym-level consumption), and by all known laws of physics I could not actually become multiple people. Also I live alone. So logic dictated that even a greedy feature-hungry guy like me should save the roughly $500 and go with the mid-range 3.2.
A note here about Smooth's pricing. I don't really fault them for it, but they use the term 'sale price' as though the machine were actually 'on sale', implying the price could go back up in the near future. This isn't really the case - just my experience based on roughly 8 months now of having periodically checked their pricing on these three machines. Since the winter of 2007 the prices have been pretty stable: both the 2.1 and the 3.2 hover at $1500 - the price difference being so small I wonder if anyone would buy the 2.1. The 7.4 is steady at $2000.
A note about 2.1 vs. 3.2. From what I can tell, these are the same machine, but with the 3.2 having a more sophisticated and feature-rich control panel. These things are very modular I've learned - I could walk over right now and in 30 seconds completely detach my control panel from the machine. In fact, my understanding is that the panels only have one fundamental interaction with the actual machinery, which is varying the current flowing to the electromagnet that controls resistance. You could (and I did experimentally) run all you want on the machine with no control panel hooked up, it just will be at the no-resistance level. Of course the panels do other important things like monitoring your speed, theoretical distance travelled, pulse rate (on some machines), but none of these things is properly mechanical. In fact, one of the things recommending the Smooth machines is that they operate on a very simple physical principle - in terms of the complexity of the machinery there's really not much to them. This is a good thing it turns out - it means less opportunity for things to go wrong, better performance and longevity.
You learn a lot about the machines when you buy Smooth, because you assemble them yourself, which also can mean troubleshooting your new purchase yourself...
So as I was saying, I had settled on the mid-range 3.2 when I got on the phone with Keith B., sales consultant. Keith upsold me, and I can't blame him for it, it's his job, and I'm a big boy who knows how to say 'No'. But I mention it because I didn't see actual salesmanly behavior coming from an internet-only operation, and it might catch you off guard as well.
As I said, Keith upsold me, and did it by appealing to my greed -- he informed me that for just $300 more I could get a used version of the illustrious 7.4 - that's a 10% discount. I'm the son of a salesman, and on the hard-sell scale I'd say Keith was at about a 5 (1 being apathetic McDonald's workers, 10 being a used car salesman), he wanted me to make the deal. And folks, deep in my heart I wanted the big boy, even though I had rationally made the conscious decision to be moderate, my primal urge was to get the biggest most expensive thing they had, and I did.
And frankly, for a 10% discount, the subsequent head and heartaches were just not worth it. I would have been better off spending the extra $200 and just buying the brand new 7.4. I'm going to be bold and tell you to refuse the offer I got if it is made to you. See, this is how I learned that the Smooth is also offered as "EVO" through the more traditional supply chain, because what I bought was some kind of store model or otherwise recycled EVO-branded 7.4 (I wasn't able to learn the actual story of the machine I bought - there were multiple used ones for sale). You can see where the EVO stickers used to be.
The deal I got was that the machine was covered by the same 5-year warranty as any other 7.4, *but* I waived right to the usual no-questions-asked return policy. I should mention that the warranty on these machines was another big selling point - 5 years on anything fundamental to the machine is a pretty good deal, better than you get on some cars, and is Hyundaiesque in how far it exceeds competitor's offers.
Anyway, the company operates out of King of Prussia, PA, two...Read more›
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