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With Mathews jumping into the two-cam market with a very interesting new design, the boundaries between brands are more blurred than ever. There sure are a lot of cam designs out there, and it's getting harder and harder to keep track of what they do -- and don't do.

We now have to decide among modular and non-modular single-cam, conventional two-cam, hybrid two-cam and binary two-cam. It's a lot to digest.

I decided to dig into this subject and, hopefully, clear up some of the confusion.

The New Mathews Two-Cam
Mathews calls its new two-cam technology AVS, which stands for Advanced Vectoring System. It is another great idea from Matt McPherson and company. Sometimes I get confused by all the hybrids, but this system is relatively easy to understand.

First, I need to point out a few characteristics of a conventional two-cam system before contrasting those with the Mathews AVS.

With a conventional two-cam system, the harness from one cam attaches directly to the axle at the other end of the bow. As long as the cams turn at exactly the same time, these systems work great. It is easy to control nock travel with a two-cam bow, and they are good at storing energy.

The big downside to conventional two-cam bows has always been that slippery eel called cam timing. If the cams aren't positioned identically, one cam will reach full draw before the other. Upon release, the nock point on the string will move up or down (depending on which cam gets to full draw first) as the string moves forward, causing poor arrow flight.

In the past, it was very hard to keep a radical, two-cam bow timed well enough to consistently produce proper nock travel. It wasn't so hard with soft cams and wheels, but seemingly no one (myself included) wants to shoot a slow bow anymore. The result was a need for high maintenance, and no one wanted that either. So, the two-cam bow faded away and the single-cam bow took over.

However, today's synthetic materials and harness production methods have improved dramatically since the mid-to-late '90s. Modern harnesses barely stretch at all, and once you break them in, they may never move again. So, you can now get away with a more aggressive two-cam system with limited maintenance. However, they still aren't as easy to maintain as single-, hybrid- and binary-cam systems.

Mathews' new AVS is a two-cam system with an interesting twist. Rather than each harness attaching directly to the axle on the other limb, it attaches to a small wheel mounted on the axle. Each harness has a looped end, and that loop goes around the wheel, which floats on bearings. As you draw, the wheel rotates, and its center actually moves from the front of the axle to the rear of the axle during the draw cycle. This benefits the shooter by increasing stored energy at the beginning of the draw and increasing letoff at the back end.

The results are impressive, with Mathews' McPherson Series Monster producing an IBO speed up to 350 fps with a six-inch brace height. The Monster XLR8 is even faster, pushing 360 fps with a five-inch brace height.

"For those who want the ultimate speed machine, these…are really the ticket," McPherson said. "They are the highest efficiency of any two cams we have ever tested, and the fastest of anything we have tested to date."