My first impressions weren’t fantastic; a whole week of riding on spring glacier snow had made the Structurn base as dry as the Sahara desert and pretty damn sticky. The Skate Twin shape rides and almost looks like a true twin, it’s only on closer inspection that you can see that it has a little less surface area in the tail to help with float in powder, sorry DC but there’s nothing revolutionary here. The other “new” technology is DC’s Lock and Load Camber which blends camber between the feet to flat sections that run from outside of the inserts to the Radius to Flat tips. These short tips are designed to bring the pop of an ollie closer to the riders feet giving it the feel of a 7ply maple deck. I found the pop of the PLY to be better than average and it was certainly easier to access than fully cambered boards with a similar flex, but what I liked most about the profile was how the flat sections provided a nice stable platform for presses and butters.

The flex on the PLY wasn’t what I was expecting, it certainly isn’t a jib board as the flex on the 156.5 was pretty middle of the road, definitely not what I would call playful. The PLY gripped well in turns and felt stable with speed so I’d categorise it as a Slopestyle board designed for riding transitions and bigger rails. In the pipe it held a good line through the flat bottom and up the walls but I didn’t get a huge enjoyment from just arcing turns down the groomers.
 
So far you’re probably getting the impression that I wasn’t overwhelmed by the DC PLY. Sure the sidecut made the board agile enough for adjusting run-ins to smaller park features. There was enough stability and edge hold to ride bigger features. The shape rode like a twin with a bit of extra versatility for deep days and there was enough pop to satisfy most. It did everything a good slopestyle board should and at its retail price it’s a certified bargain, the PLY just didn’t provide the drastically different “skateboard-like” feel the catalogue had promised. Ideally I believe my weight (72kgs) would have been better matched to the 154.

Highlights:
Lock & Load Camber’s flat sections are nice for butters and presses
Good ollie pop
Enough stability and edge hold to ride bigger park features
Can be ridden a little bit shorter

Letdowns:
Slow extruded base
Ride is a little bit mechanical
Too much hype around the “new” technologies

Little else has changed from last year’s board; despite the move to zero camber the shape is identical which should raise a sigh of relief from long-standing Paradigma fans. If there’s one thing that has always be right about the Paradigma it is its slender waist, directional ever so slightly set-back shape and smooth, verging on mellow sidecut. Short to Long radius carves melt together and edge-to-edge response is synaptic. Riding switch the Paradigma is also extremely capable. This year the Paradigma keeps its 6600 Sintruded base, I haven’t worked out what the Sintruding process involves (if there even is one) but I can safely say that the Paradigma ran equally as nicely on the hard mid-winter snow at the top of the mountain as it did on the slightly slushy man made white-stuff at the bottom. The build quality is fantastic as you’d expect, coming from Austria’s Elan factory and the little touches like the holographic inlay, two-tone sidewalls and Germanic Bauhaus styled graphics ooze as much class as Peter’s pimped-out Audi. The fact that I hope to be riding a 159 Paradigma next season says it all, I really loved it. 

Obviously the UNW8 is about performance, the flex is very firm verging on stiff and the camber is extremely aggressive. Carves on corduroy, particularly shorter radius carves need to be initiated with plenty of weight and pumping through the front foot and then boy, oh boy does the UNW8 grip. As you exit carves the power from the tail is pretty raw and on occasion I found my technique of lazily loading the tail at the end of a toe side carve caused it to skip out, on the UNW8 you need to be pumping through both feet in a turn to tame the beast. There’s plenty of pop for airs available for the strong legged and in the air the UNW8 paired with a set of Amplid Balance C2.0 bindings is practically feather-light. I felt a little less confident popping into switch on the UNW8 because it doesn’t feel forgiving like the good natured Paradigma; on number of occasions I felt the camber twitching as the contact points at the nose and tail ironed out the bumps in the piste, after a couple of switch turns my confidence returned.

The UNW8 is harder work to ride than the easy going Paradigma, it demands your concentration and the incredibly lightweight construction and lack of any substantial dampening mean given half a chance it will buck you like a rookie. On the flip-side that is precisely why advanced and expert riders will get so much from the UNW8, for carving faultless trenches up pipe walls and tweaking weightless grabs out of the coping there are few other boards as uncompromising on performance. I had a ball riding the UNW8 and I definitely wouldn’t want an experienced rider to rule it out because the precision feel of the UNW8 is truly unique and exceptional. At the end of the day, I just wasn’t good enough to get the best out of it.

The benefits of this new technology are three fold: Firstly the process uses 50% less energy than traditional core manufacture and makes use of waste material that would otherwise be discarded of. Secondly the WDT (Wood Derivative Technology) material has extremely high compressive strength, a property that traditional wood cores do not have so for stomping flat landings and airing onto all types of street furniture it will really help increase the lifetime of the board. Lastly, the WDT core has a truly unique feel; the pop is lively but the board also feel incredibly damp, it blasts through chuncky tracked-out powder and touches-down softly on boxes and rails.

I’d definitely say that the couple of hours I spent on the Dopamine were more focused on railing carves and hammering groomers rather than lapping the park which truly shows the versatility of this board, it will really suite those riders that want a park board that will also deliver the goods when you want to do blast some runs or huck into some powder. The core is certainly one of the contributing elements to this all-mountain versatility, but the flex pattern of the Dopamine is also key. The Dopamine’s Jib Rocker profile is flat between the bindings and rockered in the tips, I usually expect boards with this profile to have a firmer flex between the bindings and super soft buttery/smeary tips… just think of the K2 World Wide Weapon. The Dopamine is different, the tips actually have a good amount of resistance, you can land on them pretty heavy and they won’t wash-out so they don’t flap around when you’re cruising. Instead the majority of the Dopamine’s flex comes from between the bindings as you would expect from a jib specific cambered board. This flex pattern means butters and presses can be properly tweaked-out, but you’ve still got pop and stability in the tips. As far as the base goes, it might be extruded but I had no issues with speed at all and I was impressed by its durability, after Peter lead us down a rocky chute with a dusting of cover, the Dopamine barely had a scratch.