Jump to content
Testers Wanted: RUNNER Golf and Byrdie Golf Design ×

Tony Covey MGS

SPY VIP
  • Posts

    2,735
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

Tony Covey MGS last won the day on April 19 2016

Tony Covey MGS had the most liked content!

About Tony Covey MGS

  • Birthday December 16

Contact Methods

  • Twitter
    http://www.mygolfspy.com

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Upstate, NY

Recent Profile Visitors

51,453 profile views

Tony Covey MGS's Achievements

  1. Hey Everyone, We've sorted things out, but needed to generate a new discount code to make it work. The new code is: MXMGS15 As always, we'd appreciate if you use the supplied links: Maxfli Tour: Medium firmness with mid trajectory and spin Maxfli Tour S: The softest Maxfli Tour with high flight and low spin Maxfli Tour X: The firmest and fastest Maxfli Tour with penetrating trajectory and higher spin rates.
  2. Hey Guys, Sorry. The deal is real. We're working with DSG to get the issues with the code sorted out and will hopefully extend the offer once we do.
  3. Let me see if I can clear this up: For driver, fairway woods, and utilities, the accuracy score is derived from the Playable shot percentage and Straight Shot percentage. I believe those are explained in the relevant posts - although we did have the strokes gained reference in the post longer than we should have. We used SG in the past but moved away from it. Anticipating the follow-up questions - we got rid of strokes gained because, after looking at several years of data, we concluded that it just doesn't work as a primary metric in a large driver test. While we worked with Lou Stagner to enhance SG with additional penalties as the ball travels farther offline, in practice, there is a strong correlation with fairway percentage almost without regard for distance. With respect to Trip's comment there are a couple of points I should make. First, we don't use the PGA Tour tables. Instead, we use tables developed for scratch golfers. As it relates to higher handicap golfers - it's not a big deal. Effectively SG just sets a baseline for values, so while higher handicap golfers will produce lower SG scores, in our implementation, the best-performing clubs still produce higher scores. In that respect, the scale is almost arbitrary. It gives us a reasonable starting point. We've gone to great lengths in our methodology to neutralize the SG advantage of better/longer players. I'm not going to get into the details, but the simple explanation is that Strokes Gained is typically used to compare performance difference between golfers. We've adapted it to compare differences between clubs for the individual golfer. While I think SG is incredibly useful in a driver demo/fitting scenario, in driver and fairway wood tests, you need additional insights. For our target-based tests (hybrids, irons, and wedges, we use Strokes Gained as our accuracy metric. In this scenario, there is a correlation with greens hit, however, SG is more effective because it also considers pin proximity and lie condition. We've looked at other metrics in isolation (pin proximity, greens hit) and they don't work nearly as well as SG in this scenario.
  4. Who knew that unpainted moisture resistant drywall could create magic.
  5. Foremost, which does Vice, OnCore, the Maxlfi Tour Stuff and Wilson Staff model and TP5/5x core & mantles is in Taiwan. Snell MTB and MTB-X are made by Nassau in Korea.
  6. In my opinion, Vice does some cool stuff in terms of branding and not being afraid to try some stuff that's a little weird by conventional standards, but... Some of the marketing walks and maybe crosses the line. "Engineered in Germany" is a good place to start. Define "engineering". As I've joked on NPG, if I call my local pizza place and tell them what I want on a pie, did I engineer a pizza or simply order it to spec? That brings me to Fused Urethane and the new dimple design. Consider this highly educated speculation based on the realities of the market. Like other DTC brands, Vice is having trouble maintaining inventory. As we all know by now, golf is super-hot so demand is outpacing supply for everyone. With small-to-mid sized golf companies, those issues are compounded by the realities of the ball market, namely, the big boys get the priority and whether we're talking about Snell and Nassau or Vice and Foremost, the big boy is TaylorMade. That's especially true as Foremost does the core and mantle production for TP5/TP5x. So what I think is happening is that Vice is struggling to get inventory from its primary supplier and to offset that, it's having a *new* ball with 344-dimples and a Fused Urethane cover made somewhere else. Every indication is that the ball itself is being produced by Feng Tay. They manufacturer RZN balls, the Mizuno RB Tour stuff, and countless stuff you've never heard of. Feng Tay is pretty good, but definitely a step-down from Foremost. Why take a quality hit unless you absolutely have to? Better margins perhaps. The *new* dimple pattern is almost assuredly the same one found on the RZN balls, and - if you feel like trucking trucking to your local Walmart - the Spalding tour balls too. I wouldn't be shocked if the new Vice is similar to the Spalding Tour. Regarding Fused Urethane - it's highly unlikely that Feng Tay has made a consequential material breakthrough during COVID. Possible, but unlikely - and you can bet your house that nobody in Germany developed a new urethane process. The very high probability is that "Fused Urethane" is Vice-speak for injection molded TPE. Plus or minus a patent here or there it's the same process currently used by Bridgestone, Callaway and a bunch of others. It's only noteworthy because Foremost is a cast urethane provider so it's a fundamentally different way of putting covers on balls. Cast vs. injection molding from an advantage standpoint is one of those things where it depends on who you ask - and you'll definitely get quite a bit of 'we do it better than the other guys using a similar process', but the guys I know who source from multiple factories tend to favor cast. Probably nothing most golfers would notice or care about one way or the other, but it is what it is. Make of it what you will, but this doesn't look like reinventing a wheel so much as it does finding somebody who already has a wheel to sell you.
  7. Exactly this. This stuff drives me bonkers, so let me lay it out for everyone. Anyone who is testing golf balls on a camera based launch monitor and doesn't provide any sort of disclaimer about the fact that downrange numbers are, at best, estimates, either doesn't understand the capabilities of their tools, or isn't vested in providing an accurate picture to their audience. The more significant the difference in the dimple pattern, the less reliable the info is. For my money, the GC Quad is the best launch monitor on the planet. In our indoor test environment, nothing comes close (we can talk about radar's inability to accurately and repeatedly capture spin axis tilt in limited flight environments some other time), but it doesn't mean it's perfect. Like anything project around the house, it's important you understand your objective, and choose the right tools accordingly. When it comes to testing golf balls, Quad remains outstanding for capturing the data that's generated within the first milliseconds of flight. Ball speed, launch angle, azimuth (starting direction/horizontal launch angle), spin rate, and axis tilt are the ones I would be looking at for a ball test. When the ball is the key variable, you need to be really aggressive in how you define outliers, and of course, being really aggressive in what you remove means that with human testers, you need to hit a significant number of shots to give you enough data to work with. Peak Height, Carry, Descent Angle, Roll, total distance, and yup...Offline too, WHEN THE BALL IS THE VARIABLE and you're only capturing the initial launch, extrapolating carry, descent, total, roll, etc. differences of two different models with two entirely different dimple patterns, is no more than a semi educated guess (and the less alike the dimple, the less educated it becomes. Ball Speed, Launch Angle(s), Spin, and Axis Tilt that's what you get when the balls are different. That's perfect for Most Wanted and our lab testing because the ball isn't the variable. It's fine...even preferable to normalize downrange performance. One of our objectives is to eliminate every variable that we can. Anyway... Back to the point at hand...the Quad captures what I suppose is like an initial flight plan. It tells you what the ball happened at launch and provides a normalized view of what *should* happen the rest of the way. What it doesn't do is tweak its algorithms based on specific dimple characteristics, and it sure is hell can't detect when there's a critical defect in that pattern. There are two primary things to consider at this point, and both are related to the dimple pattern. First, let's consider the worst case scenario. Call it uneven dimpling. Whether that's from sloppy paint or where the factory inexplicably pieced together two different cover designs (it happens). In the real world, these problems would likely manifest in the offline number and would be visible over the full flight, but, and this is the important piece of it, there's be nothing in the launch data to provide any evidence of an issue. Since aero issues don't typically manifest at impact, the flight would look normal on a camera-based system. Now let's simply consider general differences or ENHANCEMENTS in aero performance over a generation or two of balls. There are fundamentally good dimple designs, fundamentally bad ones, and others that are optimized for one ball design but get used on a tons of different designs (the popular foremost dimple is a good example here - works better on 3-piece balls than 4-piece). Another great example was the original Kirkland 3-piece. In indoor tests its almost indistinguishable from a Pro V1. It spins a bit more, but otherwise... Test it with a robot, outdoors, and man...the deficiencies of the dimple pattern are glaring. A hint of wind destroys hit. I use this example because it brings the point of this conversation home. Lift (initial launch performance) is similar. Drag (what happens once the ball is in the air) is worlds apart. This is what gets obscured when the wrong tool is chosen for a ball test. Since the advent of the solid core ball, compression rules haven't much changed. A firmer ball is a faster ball. Any kid who hit both a baseball and a tennis ball with a bat fundamentally understands this...even if he hasn't thought about it in terms of golf ball performance. Likewise, the rules of spin haven't changed either. You want more spin, put a soft layer over a hard one. Want less spin, put a harder layer over a soft one. That's your simple explanation of why soft core balls (particularly 2-piece models) don't spin around the green. That leaves the cover and more specifically the aerodynamics. It's the least understood aspect of ball design, but it's likely where there's been the greatest evolution over the last decade or two, drag coefficients, the Magnus (and reverse Magnus effect), that sort of stuff are likely where the greatest opportunities remain. Ultimately, what we're talking about is stability of flight So yeah...comparing a decades old ball against a new ball, I suppose, makes for a fun read, but when you're methodology is fundamentally incapable of capturing the most significant changes over those decades, you're basically just blowing smoke to get clicks. I'd also add that golf balls have a shelf life and testing anything more than a few years is also dicey.
  8. Hi Tony.  I don't have a Twitter account, but in answer to your question as to which other balls should be tested in the first 10, how about MaxFli Tour or Tour X?  Great info, thanks for pulling this together.

  9. Much to my dismay, the number of media kits sent out by manufacturers each year has declined precipitously in recent times. Too bad, I love a good media kit, so it was nice to get this little Bag of Swagger from TaylorMade to celebrate/promote last Friday's launch of the TP5/TP5x PIX 2.0, golf balls. What you see is what you get - a dozen balls, a PIX themed squishy ball, an insulated mug (that my wife will steal), and a Sleeve of Swagger koozy. Driver head not included.
  10. Cobra sent out a media kit for the new Speedzone drivers (full story: here). As seems to be the case lately, I was traveling when it arrived, but I shot some photos today, primarily so you could see the difference in the shape/footprint of the standard model and the Xtreme. I also was messing with some lightroom presets and inadvertently transformed the version into the white, so you get a reasonable idea of what that one looks like too.
×
×
  • Create New...