Cadex Amp 3D saddle

About 18 months ago, I tested and fell in love with the Cadex Amp saddle. It was a winning combination of light weight (129g) and comfort. I used it as my regular saddle for most of last year, until I was tempted by the new raft of 3D printed saddles. Now Cadex is joining that party with the Cadex Amp 3D – a 3D printed version of the original saddle that earned inclusion in our road.cc Recommends Components of the Year. Is it an improvement on the original? Well, yes. Should you buy it? As with any saddle, that’s far trickier to answer…

> Buy now: Cadex Amp 3D for £349.99 from Giant UK

On paper, the Amp 3D gains a very meagre 18g over its feathery predecessor, bringing the total weight to a claimed 147g (149g on the road.cc Scales of Truth). This is a paltry weight penalty to pay for all the benefits 3D printing purports to bring – chiefly, enhanced comfort through superior pressure distribution.

Its actual weight on the road.cc scales is the same as Prologo claims for its 3D printed Nago R4, which it also proclaimed the world’s lightest (though it was 154g on the road.cc scales). Either way, it’s a very light saddle.

Hey, good-looking

This saddle is clearly standing on the shoulders of its brilliant forebear. The only thing I didn’t love about that saddle was its appearance. I thought it looked a little drab and boring; more commuter saddle than racy perch. The 3D printing has addressed that and then some. It’s now a fantastic looking saddle; one of the best I’ve seen – though beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In place of the high-density EVA foam of its parent, this saddle uses a ‘G3D gyroid infill pattern technology’.

‘What’s a gyroid?’ I hear you ask. Well, a combination of Wolfram and Wikipedia yield the following: The gyroid is the only known embedded triply periodic minimal surface with triple junctions. Discovered by Alan Schoen in 1970, it arises naturally in polymer science and biology, as an interface with high surface area. In addition, the gyroid does not have any reflectional symmetries.

Has that cleared it up for you? Super. Moving swiftly on then…

Okay, fine. It’s a wavy 2D flat surface that (by printing layer upon layer) twists into a 3D structure. It’s another example of the bike industry using biomimicry to ‘design’ better products by cribbing what nature’s been refining by evolution for millions of years – in this case, bird feathers and butterfly wing scales have been found to feature this structure.

So Cadex is cloning nature’s best effort at high strength-to-weight ratio constructions. That’s a fair bit of technological insight and research just to bring you a slightly lighter bicycle saddle.

Does it work? In short: yes, I’m sure it does.

Comfort conundrum

There are a variety of things in the cycling industry we can measure objectively – the weights of things, for example. The comfort of a saddle, however, is not one of them. It’s entirely subjective and varies from individual to individual. A road.cc saddle review always carries the caveat: what I find comfortable might, to you, feel like sitting on a bed of nails, or what is uncomfortable for me might make you feel like you’re floating on a cushion of air.

I had actually concluded my review of this saddle a few weeks ago, and had waffled on for another few hundred words about comfort. Most notably, the front of it (the first 6cm or so) is an AI-generated pattern and not the same supportive 3D gyroid, and it’s much softer than the rest of the saddle. So soft, in fact, that the edges of the carbon shell underneath were rather pressing into me.

A LOT of saddle tinkering later, and I had made it more bearable, but not perfect. I had therefore concluded that this super-softness at the front meant the new version wasn’t suited to me. Through bad posture, my anatomy or poor technique (or perhaps all three), I clearly put too much pressure through the nose of the saddle to make this a good option for me.

I was about to submit my review, when I met bike-fitting expert Salvatore at Sigma Sports, and he suggested a little saddle-pressure mapping might reveal what was happening here.

Here’s my pressure map on the Cadex Amp 3D as I had it set up. Notice anything?

Was this indicating that my right leg was meaningfully shorter than the left, causing much more pressure (the red) to go through one side as it was being overextended on the downstroke? As it turns out, no. The discrepancy was in fact the result of not having the saddle set perfectly straight, which was both embarrassing and easily corrected. Phew.

> The most common bike fit mistakes and how to avoid them: nail your saddle height, cleat setup and more with these top tips

Also, I had thought it too soft at the front for me, but Salvatore did several counterintuitive things. Seems I had been adjusting it the wrong way. To take pressure off the nose, I had been dropping the nose, but he raised it, while dropping the seatpost about half a centimetre.

In about 40 minutes Salvatore turned the Cadex Amp 3D from a middlingly comfortable saddle into a really comfortable saddle.

> A pro bike fitter’s top 10 cycling products to make you faster and more comfortable on the bike (and one of them is free)

The Amp was replacing a Fizik Aliante, which was a fair bit longer. Do you know the purpose of short nose saddles? I had assumed they were more comfortable, and that less ‘nose’ meant less soft tissue compression. According to Salvatore, short nose saddles “move your mass forwards, closer to the bottom bracket”. So if you’re switching to a short nose saddle, that comes with ramifications to your bike fit.

The can of worms this whole saddle review opened for me was that I was working off a bike fit that was nearly a decade old, and relying on things I didn’t think had changed…

Value

Yes, it’s a lot of money for a saddle. The original was £260, the 3D printed version is £350. But although it’s certainly towards the top end of 3D printed saddles, it’s not uniquely expensive.

It’s effectively the same price as the Prologo saddle that Sam liked, and all but identical in dimensions too. The Selle San Marco Shortfit 2.0 3D Carbon FX that impressed George is the same size as the Cadex, but 40g heavier and a tenner more: £359.99, while the Selle Italia SLR Boost 3D Kit Carbonio Superflow that Stu liked is only 27g heavier but £409.99.

And then there’s Fizik. The current king is the incredibly expensive One-to-One, and seems to be as good as it gets in saddles, where, as with everything, getting something bespoke is better than getting something designed to fit several thousand people. But you’re either in the market for a £500 saddle or you’re not.

Check out our guide to the best bike saddles for options to suit every budget.

Conclusion

The Cadex Amp 3D is very light, especially for a 3D printed saddle. It’s beautifully made, as was its predecessor, with the gorgeous carbon rails running almost the full length, providing as much sprung length as possible to improve comfort.

Objectively, it’s a terrific saddle. Whether it’s a terrific saddle for you is the big question. Do you need a short nose saddle to move your weight forward on your bike? If you do, this should be on your shortlist. If not, then it shouldn’t. And if you’re not sure, go and get a proper bike fit and work out what you need from a saddle.

> Buy now: Cadex Amp 3D for £349.99 from Giant UK

Verdict

Well-made, comfortable (the gyroid portions) and fantastically light

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