Tacx Antares Review: 5 Reasons To Buy / Not Buy
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For those new to bike rollers, the Tacx Antares represent a great first purchase. Not only do they offer excellent value for money, but thanks to the conical shape of the rollers, they’ll help keep you more stable when riding.
This being Tacx, a front wheel stand is available, although this is an additional extra.
To write our Tacx Antares review we spent 12 hours reading reviews from experts and users. In summary, this is what we found:
5 reasons to buy
- Many product owners found them to be light and compact to store
- The Tacx Antares rollers represent great value for money
- The conical roller shape helps to create stability when in use
- Great road-like feel when cycling
2 reasons not to buy
- Plastic rollers
- Not the quietest rollers on the market
- Magneto resistance is an add-on purchase
Tacx Antares Review
When it comes to value for money, it’s hard to beat the Tacx Antares, particularly if this is your first time using a set of rollers and you can’t be sure if they’re for you.
The black frame with distinctive blue plastic rollers looks fantastic, but what’s it like to own and use the Tacx Antares?
Let’s find out.
Setup
It can often be a pain to setup rollers, having to constantly adjust the front roller position until you get this right for your wheelbase. It’s also extremely common to set the front roller only to discover that it’s not correctly lined up.
Riding when your roller isn’t correctly adjusted isn’t just difficult, it can also result in a creaking noise as the roller twists the bearings.
Thankfully, the Tacx Antares is not just easy to setup, it’s also extremely easy to adjust to make sure that you’ve got everything dialed in correctly before you ride.
Under each runner there’s a small button that allows you to adjust the telescopic runner to the correct distance for your wheelbase (details are provided in the manual).
Ride Quality
The Tacx Antares is smooth to ride. What most owners seem to like is the conical shape to the rollers which helps keep the rider in a central position which helps reduce wobble and drifting to one side or the other.
The bearings are good and there’s enough resistance to make it all feel very similar to riding on the roads. This is great when you want to warm up the legs before a race or complete steady sessions.
Like a lot of more affordable sets of bike rollers, things start to struggle when you want to complete interval sessions due to a lack or resistance to push against. The Tacx Antares is no different here, so if you’re looking for a set of rollers to let you pump out the big watts then you might want to consider a more expensive set or you’ll need to purchase the additional resistance unit.
As you’d expect from Tacx, a front wheel stand is available for those riders who just want a little more front end stability.
Build Quality
Build quality is excellent and while these are certainly one of the cheaper roller sets available from Tacx, they certainly haven’t skimped on quality.
With high quality bearings, toughened plastic rollers and a very stable metal frame, the Tacx Antares has been built to last no matter how hard you train on the bike.
The Bottom Line
So there you have it, during our Tacx Antares review we’ve found a fantastic entry level bike roller setup that’s going to be ideal for first timers or those on a budget. While it does lack a few of the features often found on higher quality products, it certainly offers extremely good value for money.