Actually my guess, would be that the straightline cams only would provide the best nock travel w/ a parallel limb design. The SL cams seem to rely on very little limb tip travel so they can precisely control the feed and take up to offer straight nock point travel. On a bow design such as the Conquest (or Rival) that has much more limb tip travel and longer limbs, this might not be the case.

It is my speculation that at least up to this point Mathews has not been able to figure out how to design a long axle to axle parallel limb bow that supplies the wanted/needed speed for 3D and also provides the nock travel benefits of the straight-line cam design. The cam would “need to worry” more about loading the limbs over a greater distance (utilizing more aggressive sharper angled cable/string tracks) which could keep it from being as precise as it needs to be to control nock travel. Case in Point: The Q2XL. A fine shooting bow, but it has failed in this regard due to lack of top-end performance (and most Mathews Pro’s have rejected it in that respect) as is the case with the Icon, too.

Other manufacturers have approached the problem by using the hybrid design that uses an eccentric (instead of an idler) to control nock travel while letting the power cam handle the bulk or all of the energy storage; or simply used a proven dual cam design to curtail performance loss; or have ignored the nock travel issue and just slapped a max-cam style single on the longer bow (as Mathews and some others are doing).

Furthermore, if the standard max-cam was “good enough”, why worry about bringing out the SL type cams in the first place? If they just wanted a smoother drawing cam, they could have gone back to the designs prior to the max-cam. Why would Mathews also consider nock travel into the mix, when they had dismissed it as a non-issue in advertising prior to the SL cam design in 1998? Mathews furthers this argument in admitting (with the Icon in 2002) that for the most consistent accuracy a bow needs not only eccentrics (or in this case idler/eccentric) of similar size in diameter, but also they should be similar in shape (which, as we know of course, promotes better nock travel). With the current advertising denouncing Hoyt, they have made it an even bigger issue. They have certainly changed their advertising tune in the past 6 years.

The answer clearly is that there is something to it, but I also think both sides have blown the severity of the effects of nock travel issues way out of proportion.