Depends how far you want to go. I put one of these on for the Paris Roubaix sportive (and was very glad that I did).

A comment: lower tire pressure

A question: can you explain how carbon helps?

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http://www.jt10000.com/

+1 on the redshift shockstop. Works great on my gravel bike. Considering adding one to my road bike.

No disagreement on tire pressure; yet, realistically you can only go so low without inviting pinch flats with tubes and higher rolling resistance.as one goes lower.

From what I've read carbon, carbon bikes, seat posts and bars take out some road buzz. So no I probably can't explain it sufficiently to you and that is why I am asking.

So far I have some helpful answers though.

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Indoor Triathlete - I thought I was right, until I realized I was wrong.

Wow! Looks like a winner and a price point of $150. Much cheaper than buying a new bike with suspension.

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Indoor Triathlete - I thought I was right, until I realized I was wrong.

Thank you for showing me this. I'm going to do this next rather than chasing other ways. Cheaper than carbon bars and the reviews are good. Thanks again!

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Indoor Triathlete - I thought I was right, until I realized I was wrong.

The Shokstop is the best comfort upgrade I ever made! I have it on my road bike and on my gravel bike. It adds to much more comfort, its really worth it!

grab a nice pair of cushioned cycling gloves.

Otherwise, double-wrap your bars ( or wrap them much more heavily where you normally have your hands) and perhaps look into a tubeless road wheelset which would let you run lower tire pressure.

Carbon fiber is a good damper, especially compared to aluminum. Look at camera tri-pod reviews to get an idea or how much it matters.

However, I agree that lower tire pressure could be a better solution.

The problem with making this about carbon vs aluminum is that this is all about design and implementation rather than material. Yes, carbon can be more comfortable than Al for bars, but what you are after is deflection which comes from being lower stiffness. The 'damping' so often referred to in carbon components is more of a marketing scam, or at best, you will find that the carbon component with lower flex has a little bit of more damping than an aluminum bar of similar stiffness/flex. Remember, damping is the resistance to movement, so it only matters if there is movement, and then you have to consider whether or not you want that movement resisted.

We cover this in the Marginal Gains Podcast episode on Hysteresis.. what makes the tire so perfect for absorbing bumps is that it has high deflection and very low damping, so it can add considerable comfort at very low cost to efficiency. The Lauf fork works on the same principle and the RedShift stem and seat post are not too far off.

Lastly, pay close attention to your bar tape. We developed the Nastro tape line after realizing in testing that most bar tapes had high damping coefficients which is NOT what you want in a bar tape. Essentially, the tape gets compressed down by the weight of your hands on it, and then under dynamic loading, it cannot rebound quickly enough under your hand to be re-squished with each impact.. so essentially you are riding around on nearly rigid, bottomed out foam rather than having the foam respond actively to loads. We solved this by using a foam developed for the Nike 4% project which has 80% lower damping than standard foams used in tape, and found that we could make the tape softer yet also have higher rebound (just like the shoes).
https://info.silca.cc/nastro

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http://www.SILCA.cc
Check out my podcast, inside stories from more than 20 years of product and tech innovation from inside the Pro Peloton and Pro Triathlon worlds!
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I double wrap my handlebars which help enough on the gravel bike.

I recently swapped from FSA Omega alloy bars, which are widely criticized for being harsh, to carbon Giant Contact SLR D-Fuse bars (from the latest Defy), which are supposedly some of the most "compliant" drop bars made. While I can feel the new Giant bars give a little on big hits, they're not much better at filtering road "buzz" from coarse chip-seal. I've already gone to 28c, 320 tpi cotton-casing tires and latex tubes at modest-for-my-weight pressure. (80 psi, +/- 200lbs). Next step is better bar tape; going to give the Silca Nasto Fiore a try. If that's not enough, a ShockStop stem will be my last-ditch effort to save this frame.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

I tend to think of damping as the dissipation of energy from an impulse in a spring/mass/damper system. This can come from some find of viscous damper like those found in shocks or from friction. In regards to carbon fiber, I had always thought this was due to friction resulting from relative movement of the individual fibers within the mat/cloth. As such, layup process, orientation and construction matters as you said.

I agree with you in that I don't want rigid and that carbon can be made very rigid. I also don't a highly flexible system in which the impulse forces never die out (pure mass/spring system). I want a system with some compliance/allowed deflection to absorb energy from an impulse and then dissipates that energy quickly without creating subsequent oscillations.

What I see you talking about, at least in regards to bar tape, sounds more like the spring constant in the system. Super squishy tape that highly compresses due to body weight and then acts as a rigid body with about the ability to deform.

You are correct, damping affects the rate at which a vibration will die out in the system.. but remember, your hands and body are pretty highly damped, so while I can show you a curve of damped vs undamped vibration in an object, the reality is that with your hands on the bars, the damping coefficient of the bars themselves is pretty minor.

Having said that, in a damped system, you can have areas of effectively very high stiffness existing within the hysteresis gap between the bump and rebound curves.. and I think that this is where we get confused. So taking our damped bar tape example, if we made bar tape from memory foam (which is very highly damped) it feels great in the shop, but on the road you find that it is effectively behaving as a nearly rigid substance when exposed to high frequency vibrations. This is an example of something with low static stiffness having high dynamic stiffness when it is incapable of responding quickly enough to input vibrations. The same can be true of suspension designs as well, if you've ever experienced 'packing' on your mtb suspension fork, it is the same phenomenon, the fork cannot extend quickly enough from one hit to the next, and it is effectively 'packed' down to the bump stop as each hit is impacting an already compressed system.

Now for something like a handlebar or seat post, the amount of damping only matters if there is sufficient flexibility in the first place. This has been one of the big problems for 30+ years when it comes to carbon parts. The industry sold them on 'damping' but in many cases they were much stiffer than the more refined aluminum parts they were replacing so the damping really didn't matter, and the parts were just far more harsh riding. As our designs and manufacturing have improved, the ability of manufacturers to make products with more tuned flexibility has also improved, but I see that some of the light carbon bars of today are still on par with the light aluminum bars of 20 years ago when it comes to stiffness so the added damping might be a small benefit in a flexible enough bar, but unlikely one that would be perceptible to a rider.

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http://www.SILCA.cc
Check out my podcast, inside stories from more than 20 years of product and tech innovation from inside the Pro Peloton and Pro Triathlon worlds!
http://www.marginalgainspodcast.cc