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Agree. And wrongly. The grand master of alu was and is Gary Klein. Klein, however, fell victim to Trek which he joined to get a network to compete against the superior marketing of Canondale.. Klein's genes live on.. The Quantum is clearly the grand dad of the Storck (which btw. started off as the Klein importer to Germany) and a number of others.. Old Kleins are cool.. Old Canondales are about as "sexy" as an empty can of Pepsi.. the coolest old Canondale product in my book was the Coda Magic Cranks--- which set the stage for Shimano to make hollow cranks--- but it was really a Coda and the Canondale follow-ups were pretty darn boring...

Nah

Longer answer:

I like Cannondales - and the reason behind this is that they always seem to have been an engineering led company.

They invented the BB30 standard and then open sourced it, they pushed a single sided fork (strut?) into production and kept it there, constantly refining it.

They pushed the understanding of how to use aluminium as a frame material- sometimes to failure, it is true. As Howard says, the CAAD9 was a stage winning frame.

With the SystemSix they (possibly apocryphal , I grant you) lost money on every frame made, such was the complexity of the manufacturing process. They did it anyway, and created another stage winning frame.

The Hollowgram SiSl2 is the current iteration of the Coda crank- constantly evolving, rather than rebadging someone else's kit and slapping it on.

The Evo Nano is at the cutting edge of carbon frame design, the CAAD10 at the cutting edge of alloy frame design.

Beyond that, I really enjoy riding mine.