Originally Posted by
Camilo
I've had triples and...always liked that I could use the center ring most of the time and just shift to the big or small occasionally. I now have a couple of "compact doubles" and, while they work just fine, I find myself shifting the front a lot more.
This is my use case for triples, also. I ride in the center ring in almost all scenarios (which is usually a 32-36, depending on the bike) and will shift down to the small ring when I've run out of low gear on the middle ring and will shift up to the big ring when I've run out of high gear. Though I have a few 1x bikes, I generally prefer the 3x because I can get the gear range I want without either: big steps in a cassette, or a higher-cost 11 or 12-speed setup that would get me the range I want. I like the 11-13-15-18-21-24-28 spacing on a typical 7-speed cassette. Add a 32 or 34 for 8-speed, and add a 36 or 40 on top of that for 9-speed. I want much more range than that, so I'd need to keep adding sprockets, pushing me into territory where I'd rather not be. For those reasons, I prefer having the range on the front, and thinking of each ring as its own "range", like a 4x4 transfer case, where you have "low range" and "high range". Except on my bikes, I've got "low range", "mid range", and "high range". It works well.