by aermet on Sun May 05, 2013 8:58 am
Went to Campy exclusively over 15 years ago.
Fitted a bike with Di2 shortly after it was released. That precipitated my exodus away from campy.
Still had a couple of bikes, one record, one chorus, 11 speed. Once I started riding the Di2, I found that I couldn't spend much time on my campy bikes, Di2 was, for me, that much nicer. I know you inquired about DA9000, please bear with me.
I used to think it was so cool to be able to change my index springs, index washers, etc. (don't get to do that with the new campy design) Except I've come to find out that the various mechanical DA7900 as well as Di2 components have yet to fail me once.
Here's something to consider.
Had a newer 11 speed record shifter go bad. 1 month to get it back under warranty.
The second time something broke, just a few months after the first one, and before a big race-shop ended up speaking to campy USA, and after speaking to quite an a***hole there, was literally told, "What do you want me to do about it!#!".
I swore I would never own campy again.
You pay the premium price, get miserable customer service, and have to smile while you're getting it.
Last I knew, if you have an issue with a campy component, and you are in the USA, you must go through your local shop, where they will send the component back to a campy distributor who must be approved to repair it-and they will try to repair it before determining if/when they send out the replacement. If you're lucky, you'll be without your campy equipped bike for at least 2 weeks, (unless you're willing to pay for next day/second day ups shipping) if not so lucky, much longer than that.
Campy in the USA does not, for the most part, stock any components. They are for the most part, only administrative and have a small service facility, (what for?) hence parts going back to the distributors.
With Shimano or SRAM, if you have a problem, the shop picks up the phone, calls either shimano or sram directly, and they will, 95% of the time put your new replacement part in the mail immediately.
The shop returns your old component after they exchange/replace it. You're on the road in 1-2 days on the outside if you're in the western half of the US with shimano (though they now also have a warehouse on the east coast) and within 3 or 4 days with sram (they're in the midwest). In my experience, customer service from shimano and sram are excellent. They seem to actually have some sort of ethos/culture that seems to want to really take care of the customer and get them back on their bikes as soon as possible.
As far as the actual feel/operation of the shimano/sram/campy components, the new DA9000 mechanical, for me, is so close to perfection that if it weren't for the satellite shifters I use on my Di2 bike, I wouldn't even use Di2 anymore. It works that well. Front shifting and brakes are even a notch better than DA7900. They have done a fantastic job with DA9000.