The details of the SRAM XX MTB group are now fully out and tech geeks across the country are drooling. But with my initial puddle of drool starting dry up, a closer look leaves me thinking that some of the details are a bit… meh. Now I’m not trying to bash SRAM, I am grateful that they took the initiative to put an end to the granny gear. But, I’m hoping at some point in time that a major manufacture will just stop dissappointing.

First up, wholy what the hell are they thinking with a $300 plus cassette. Sure you can easily drop way more ridiculous cash on a frame or a wheelset. But at least those items can be rationalized as investments that can last several years. But under normal use a casette is good for maybe a season. Now throw in a few mud rides… and you’re looking at $1000+ of cassettes every year. Maybe they’ve teamed up with some trail conservancy and came up with a plan to finally keep riders off trails when they are too muddy. Or maybe they just plan on doing major cassette shwagg tosses at DSG every year. The cassette effectively makes the XX a “Masters” group because the old guys are going to be the only ones that can afford to actually race it.

OK, onto the other big Meh. The cassette, if you can afford it, has such a wide range that you’ve recreated the triple using just 2 rings. Brilliant, if we where still in the 1990s. See the triple has been pointless since the 9 cog cassette hit the scene. With an 11-34 spread most people could just camp out all day in the middle ring. And depending on your quad to gut ratio you could either ditch the granny or big ring for 99.9% of the riding you did. A double front chain-ring used to make a whole lot of sense. But when you combine a 10 cog 11-36 cassette with a double chain-ring you end up right back at riding around with a useless chain-ring. All would be fine if you could just trade a ring for a bash guard and the deraillure for a jump-stop. But SRAM monkeyed with the chainline to give you big ring access to all the cogs and then went all proprietary on the spider. The result is 1×9-block because the big ring spider is too big for a practical ring. And the inner ring only hits 8 out of the 10 rings. Sure you could throw the NOIR single ring crankset on there, but it doesn’t match. And anyone spending 300 bones on a cassette is going to get pretty pissy if there group doesn’t match.

Finally, for the sake of freaky-deaky lightness, and super exotic price-tag, SRAM went magnesium on the brake caliper bodies. Wicked, I know. Problem is that you just stuck a poor heat dissipating barely lighter than aluminum metal in a spot where heat build up is a bigger problem than weight. Sure XX is a cross-country specific group. But long climbs lead to long downhills. And if I where in the mood to tolerate questionable braking to save a touch of weight I could just phone the 1990s and place an order for some V-brakes and maybe have enough money left over to buy and extra cassette or two… well probably just one extra cassette.

After going through all that, it looks like we are calling meh on more than just the small details. Fortunately for SRAM, they are the new “it” manufacturer for group-sets and XX is likely to be a huge market success. I am somewhat optimistic the market success will lead to a trickle down of the 11-36 into an X9 price range, hell even X0 price range. Seeing a XX single ring crankset though, not going to happen. Producing such a logical product, would be an admission that the cheaper and lighter way to have optimized shifting of the front rings would have been to just toss one more ring and the derailleur and gone 1X9 or just X. In the meantime XX is look but don’t touch expensive, and pointlessly revolutionary.