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Home > Tacx i-Magic Streering Frame
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Tacx i-Magic Streering Frame
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Show more by Tacx
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- Enhance your virtual reality experience with the Tacx Steering Frame
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Product Description:
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The steering frame is absolutely essential in order to experience the interactive game element at its best. - The Tacx Steering frame is compatible with any wired VR trainer (Fortius and i-Magic)
- The Steering frame is also compatible with the Flow trainers once the flow has been upgraded with the VR Head Unit and software - the upgrade is a necessary prerequisite in order for the steering frame to be compatible with the Flow
- The Tacx Steering frame is compatible with any wired VR trainer (Fortius and i-Magic)
- Foldable design can be transported and stored easily
- The Steering frame is also compatible with the Flow trainers once the flow has been upgraded with the VR Head Unit and software - the upgrade is a necessary prerequisite in order for the steering frame to be compatible with the Flow
- Rubber at the bottom side prevents the rider from moving and reduces noise
- The front wheel is put into a turntable plate and it doee not have to be removed from the bicycle
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Customer Reviews:
Add Your Own Review |
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 if you gotta ride bikes, don't getta this!, January 14, 2011
By MyRecords (Rochester, NY United States)
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I am the sad owner of one of these units. Because Tacx's software does not work more often than it works, you won't get much use out of the steering unit. If you do get a chance to use it, you will find there is precious little to steer through. The Virtual Reality interface, aside from being utterly boring, doesn't provide for a good steering experience. Invariably you steer too far left or too far right, and end up biking like you are drunk. Like almost every Tacx user, you will turn steering off, because it causes many more problems than it creates interesting rides.
As for the Tacx software: Anyone interested in a Tacx Trainer should surf on over to tacx dot com, click on service, and enter the forum. Take a look at the section called "Tacx Trainer Software ("TTS") 3 software support", and count, if you can, the number of problems with Tacx Trainer Software. You will not be able count the entire number of problems. These are not small problems either. These are problems that render your brand new multi-thousand dollar Fortius trainer useless. Whats worse is that when Tacx gets around to trying to patch the problem, the patch makes it worse. Again, go to the forum and look what happened when Tacx went from version 3.01 to version 3.1. Chaos and crashes.
Now buggy software is something we are all used to, but imagine you are 30, 40, or 80 minutes into a 2 hour training ride, and all of the sudden the Tacx craps out on you. You lose your training data, and your computer crashes, causing you to prematurely stop your workout. Of course this presumes that you are lucky enough to actually get the software running -- because that in itself can be miraculous depending on what version of TTS you are running.
O.K. you say, they will work out, and this trainer will be smokin hot. Not so fast. This is Tacx Trainer Version 3.0. After you have poked around the forum looking at TTS 3.0, then go have a look at the Tacx Trainer Software 2.0 - 1.0 forum. Tacx trainer software 2.0 was so bad, that they gave up on it, and released TTS 3.0. But here is the kicker -- they charged the owners of 2.0 $65.00 to "upgrade" to 3.0. This was on top of the $40.00 charge they charged to upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0. The problems with 2.0 lasted for at least two years before they finally gave up on it. There is no reason to think that once Tacx relizes that 3.0 is unfixable, they will charge you another 40, 50, 60, hundred bucks to "upgrade" to TTS 4.0.
I have had my Tacx trainer since 2003. It has very little mileage on it because the software makes it largely inoperable. I paid $130 for tacx trainer software version 1, another 40 for 2.0 and another 60 for 3.0 -- thats $230.00 on top of the cost of the trainer for software that simply does not work. Tacx is located in the Netherlands, and you can not contact them directly. Sadly, while the Tacx USA representatives are extremely nice (i suspect they deal with a lot of disgruntled Tacx customers) there is no getting contact from Tacx Netherlands. So the frustration of having spent a ton of money on something that if it worked - would be so awesome -- only compounds.
I was patient with Tacx for 7 years. I purchased all of their downgrades, i purchased ten of their videos, i am out about $2500 for a trainer that i can not rely on to work. I am out countless hours -- and I mean at least a weeks worth of time in real hours, in trying to get Tacx software to work. I've even gone as far as buying a single computer dedicated solely to running tacx software. I've had to do enumerable operating system reloads, tacx software reloads, driver updating software updating, etc. I am not a computer expert, but i have had to learn a heck of a lot of computerese just to try to get this stuff to work.
Finally, tacx will tell you that it can't really be as bad as I say, and that thousands of tacx users have no problems whatsoever. I would suggest going to their forum, reading their comments, and making your own decision.
2 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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 Excellent and essential addition to Tacx trainer setup, August 13, 2011
By Visit my Amazon Profile page! (Bay Area, CA)
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While there are plenty of quirks to the Tacx software, this is not the software to be reviewed. This is the steering addition to the Tacx trainers.
If you want a review of the Tacx software or Tacx system over all, look at those products for their reviews.
This is a review of this product - the steering frame.
First, if you use any of the VR programs (like the Tacx VR or the NetAthlon stuff), adding steering is an absolute must and will transform your experience entirely. It makes the indoor training much much more entertaining and interesting. Perhaps most importantly, it allows you in Tacx software to define an unlimited number of your own routes in the VR worlds. I only wish there were more VR terrains out there. You want to make hill repeats for you VR training? Just use the steering and ride around the course however you want to make that. You want hill repeats, then rest, then more repeats... ditto. Without the steering for ALL other systems you are forced to use ONLY the defined routes you get and have to buy.
Even for pre-recorded routes in VR, steering makes it a lot more interesting as you can virtually ride around other riders (or around your own past recorded rides). The steering makes the VR system with the presence of the VR riders you can pass, ride behind, ride around, ever so much better. In the Fortius VR you have the added entertainment of drafting other riders, which only really works with steering turned on.
If, on the other hand, you ONLY use the Real Life Video, then steering is pretty much meaningless until they figure out how to actually insert riders into the video directly (one day...).
So, the summary is that for this product: the steering frame - it is 5 stars all the way.
For the Tacx software and tech-support I will not comment.
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