Welcome to the family! 
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“Independent verification” of the benefits of my EQ dressage saddle - had a lesson with my coach today and she noticed my improved position, Zane’s movement being more free through the shoulders, and his lateral work was more even and responsive to my aids.
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So happy to have found this thread! I’ve been looking into these saddles for a couple months now. Please let me know your thoughts on the jumping saddle! I am just waiting for my horse to get going a bit more before doing a trial, but I’m wondering how stable the jumping saddle will feel - especially going cross country.
Hard to take the plunge on a saddle that costs more than my horse did!
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I love the jump saddle and so does my horse! I’ve had the trial jump saddle 3 weeks (I lost a week of riding because my horse ran into a tree and put a hole in himself right where the panel sits! 
) and I will lease it for the 10-12 weeks it takes for my ordered customized version to arrive. It is awesome - very stable and secure - zero issues there for show jumping or cross country, including up and down some decent hills. It puts me in a great position whether in 2 point or sitting/3 point. It feels much closer contact (even with the flap on, but I ride it flapless normally) and I find my horse is much more responsive to my leg and weight aids than in our previous “normal” saddles (both a blessing and a curse - he reflects my crookedness more than he used to and if I forget this sensitivity and use “normal” aids, I get rather exuberant flying changes!). I also love that I can make minor adjustment for my balance or his fit very easily by myself (with help from EQ if needed).
You do have the option of purchasing the trial saddle you get. Mine is an older one and it would be significantly cheaper to purchase it than buying new (but it’s brown and everything I own is black and I am splurging just a little since I got a good deal on the dressage saddle), so you might find it’s not quite as expensive as you fear. Their customer service has been wonderful too!
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I didn’t realize the flaps were removable!
It sounds like you’re only using it on one horse but was/is it easy (or necessary) to make adjustments to the panels like if you were swapping between horses? There are some hard-to-fit horses at my barn that I think would really benefit from these saddles, but I think the only way my trainer would be interested in it is if she could adjust it quickly and easily between horses. I’d just get one to trial myself and passively see if she loved it, but I’m not in a position to buy it, so I’d feel a bit guilty “wasting” their time.
They do a monoflap and a flapless (with removable flaps) version. I loved my flapless dressage saddle so much, I wanted the same in my jumping saddle.
I am only using it on one horse. These saddles are still treed, so the tree shape has to at least be close to the horse’s shape. The used dressage saddle I purchases is slightly wider than my horse needs, but it works with a sheepskin pad. So if the multiple horses needed similar trees, then minor changes could make one saddle work for multiple horses, but if they need significantly different trees, then it wouldn’t work. While some adjustments are easy enough to do between horses (eg. changing the saddle pad or adding/subtracting a shim), the more significant ones would be annoying to do on a daily basis, so it would really depend how much changes were needed between the different hard to fit horses!
I think you’d want to take some tracings of the hard to fit horses and send them to EQ to see if there would be a tree that might work for all or some of them and then discuss the options with them from there. Trialing one yourself with the idea that your trainer might love it and purchase one doesn’t really seem like a waste of time…
I have experience with ReactorPanel saddles, which are the sister company and adjusted in the same way. You (g) would NOT want to adjust these on a daily basis. It would be more complicated and time-consuming than swapping a changeable gullet (a la Wintec or similar), and you would need to be quite good at fitting to get it right, first try, every time, by yourself.
It would work fine in a sale barn where you set it up for horse X and then adjust to horse Y when X sells, presuming X and Y are roughly the same tree width.
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Oh I see, thanks for the clarification. Sounds like it might not be quite the novel solution I had hoped. Are the panels/discs themselves difficult to get off? or is it just time consuming to get the fit right?
Maybe I’ll still try one out on my own though. I’m really quite fascinated by them.
No, they aren’t particularly difficult to get off (they are just very strong velcro), but once you get everything in the right place for one horse, you may find it too fiddly to make minor adjustments every ride if you are switching horses a lot and in a hurry (as trainers often are!). You’d also want to find a way to mark the right positioning for each horse as that would at least make it easier to make quick changes. However, if the horses are wildly different in shape/size (and not super sensitive like my boy with kissing spine is), you might just be able to swab saddle pads.
I totally recommend giving it a try regardless as it will all make much more sense and you would be able to get a better feeling the adjustment process for how it might work for different horses within your trainer’s program.
Thanks so much for the response! I was having trouble finding reviews on how the jump saddle felt, so that’s great to hear 
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Agreed with the others that the discs aren’t hard to move, it’s more making sure they’re in the right spot for the horse so the balance is right and it isn’t causing pressure points. I think you might be able to work out a system if you had a few horses of similar back shaped and you could use a specific color paint marker outline or something to indicate where the disk goes on the tree and panel for each horse. Then you wouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel each time and could just move it to their “spot.” I was considering asking Carmi to mark out the correct location for the discs for me this way once I get my custom ordered one just incase the pad or panel catches on the saddle rack and comes unvelcroed. That happened with the loaner I have 2 weeks ago and made me a little panicked. Luckily there was an decent imprint for me to follow and reattach things.
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I had the same thing happen with my trial jump saddle - I caught one panel on the saddle rack and it detached. Fortunately, the other was still in the right place, so I just had to match the detached one up. My newer dressage saddle does have the “correct” position marked with white (slightly off for my horse as I bought it used so the marks are for the original owner’s horse), so I’m hoping that’s how my custom ordered jump saddle will come.
You could also trace around the disc with a silver sharpie to mark its position. 
The panels don’t tend to pop off once they’ve molded to the horse and settled in for a bit (we typically say 10-15 hours of ride time). I can grab both of my saddles by the panels and give them a solid shake and they don’t come un-attached. I screamed the first time I tried it, but really wanted to convince myself that they weren’t that fragile.
As far as making multiple adjustments, it’s not really recommended as repositioning wears out the mushroom-shaped head on the super-strength velcro over time.
It’s always worth checking in to see if the same saddle setup might work on multiple horses. Given the design and dynamic features, it’s possible that several horses might be happy with the same setup if they’re not wildly different in shape. We’ve also been able to ‘custom-fit’ pads to accommodate.
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Yes, this is definitely true! Now that I’ve had both my EQ saddles for a while, neither are prone to the panels detaching any more.
Still in love with these saddles and (not-so)patiently waiting for my custom jump saddle to arrive from England. The awesome thing is I still have the loaner jump saddle to use while I wait!
The dressage saddle continues to be great for both me and my horse. A friend sat in it yesterday and just walked a few circles and immediately commented how it allowed her leg to drape into a better position and her toe didn’t turn out as much as it does in her own saddle.
Fantastic update! Can’t wait to see your custom saddle - what color(s) did you go with? I’m also less-than-patiently waiting for a custom dressage.
As someone who doesn’t ride competitively is there a reason to pick EQ over Reactor or vice versus since they are sister companies?
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I went with black with purple welting and other accents. Nothing too crazy! 
What did you go with?
My understanding is the Reactor panel side focuses on endurance and trail riding, while the EQ side focuses on dressage and jumping. So it just depends what kind of saddle you want for the kind of riding you do.
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Ooh! Sounds lovely - my current/up-for-adoption saddle actually has (velcro) purple blocks! Possibly I went crazy on the custom order… black with charcoal grey accents and a carbon fiber cantle insert and patent welting.
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I am excited because I am going to see them for the first time in person tomorrow. I have seen the old reactor panel saddle and excited to see how they have changed.
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I have a jump EQ on trial right now. Are you still happy with yours?
