StairMaster8 Series 8G Gauntlet Stepmill Stepper Exercise Machine with LCD Console

It’s a great stair master and wonderful quality. There are many features in our model that make it exceptional. The customer service was top notch. Would highly recommend.

Took a few hours to put together but seems to be very sturdy and exactly what we were looking for. Not as noisy as expected from other reviews. Very happy so far.

I have had the Stairmaster 8 for about a month now and I have to say for the extremely high cost, I am very surprised at the quality of the engineering. Clearly no effort has been made to make the machine smooth and quiet. There is extremely loud transmission whine and if you are doing two steps at a time a large "clunk" can be heard and felt as your lower foot gets towards the bottom of the stairs. The whining and grinding and clunking was so bad that I called out a service guy and he confirmed that's just the way the unit is. The large clunk it turns out, is the bottom step folding underneath as it goes around. The noise from the whining and grinding is so loud that you can't hear an ipad at full volume on the console, you would need to wear headphones.Regarding the console, the lcd screen is directly out of the 1980s, is extremely unintuitive to navigate, especially if you are trying to go to different settings like climb different monuments. I'm pretty computer-savvy and it took me a while of trial and error to find how to do various things (still haven't figured out others). The instructions are useless, they mention the features but don't explain how to access them. Regarding the lack of a touch-sensitive screen, since you can buy a touch sensitive screen (e.g. samsung etc) for around $100 I am disgusted that a touch sensitive screen is not standard. In fact if you want a touch sensitive screen on the unit, it is thousands extra. I am lost for words.Regarding maintenance, the manual is clear that every 3 months you have to re-torque the bands to certain tensions and they give a pound range and there are another bunch of maintenance items that are required. What? How is the user supposed to torque the bands, especially when the manual doesn't even explain how to do it, It's ridiculous.I purchased the unit without even trying it due to covid, relying on Stairmaster being a household name and the unit costing $8,000 but I am astonished at how agricultural and basic and noisy and poorly engineered the unit is. Truly speechless. Now I'm stuck with it. Don't make the same mistake as me.