Hi cdisracerx,
[quote]We are also seeking the best mattress (as opposed to anything else LOL!)
This MU site is the “bomb” of all sites I would only wish whatever the product or service could have something as informative / researchable as this!!
Hats off! to you Mr. Phenix as I have read for hours on many of your posts and I never knew so much went into a mattress purchase but so glad I have found the information to better help get the 3 -P’s right and Values. (I ran my existing mattress thru the criteria and it made me even more sore trying to sleep on it!!..information is powerful)[/quote]
Thanks for the kind words … I appreciate it 
[quote]Ok-on to my point- After studying this site we went for our 1st sampling and found the gentleman to be knowledgable at our local UM store here in Colorado.
Being older, major back problems & active, I always thought firm was what I needed and went for a memory foam many years ago and while traveling recently I stayed in a Boutique Hotel and got a fantastic nights sleep and it made me start thinking…
So armed with the information we looked up what we had slept on in the Hotel and used as a starting point when we got to the store and he proceeded to show us lines that had a similar feel or better and began to work our way up thru the construction differences and all were in the "plush mix btw.
(After reading I would agree we are seeking something that does the supportive measure followed by the big parts kept in-alignment.)[/quote]
There is also more about primary or “deep” support and secondary or “surface” support and their relationship to firmness and pressure relief and the “roles” of different layers in a mattress in post #2 here and in post #4 here that may also be helpful in clarifying the difference between “support” and “pressure relief” and “feel” that but this may also be more than you really need to know because the most reliable way to know whether a mattress has good primary support, secondary support, and pressure relief in all your sleeping positions is based on careful testing (hopefully using the testing guidelines that are linked in step 4 of the tutorial).
Many consumers believe that “firmer is better” or somehow more “supportive” but if this was the case then everyone would be sleeping on the floor and of course a flat floor doesn’t contour to the shape of your body very well and provides very poor support for the recessed parts of your body profile which would only have air underneath them.
[quote]We so far have narrowed our search (Full, we could fit on a Twin which is another problem for matresses when sleeping like spoons) to a Dunlopillo Ambiance and a Prana Super Vinyasa,
I do not plan to turn this into a mattress hunt for months, more like this week so I was curious as to others /Brands I should consider as I’m totally new in this…and/or thoughts on our choices so far…
I can copy the specifications into this if you prefer for future references.
Sincerely,[/quote]
You can read a little more about the Dunlopillo Ambiance in this topic and I would be cautious with any mattress that has more than “about an inch or so” of lower quality and less durable materials or “unknown quality/density” materials in the upper layers of the mattress. A forum search on “Ambiance” will also bring up more comments and feedback about it as well.
You can see some comments about the Prana mattresses in general and the Super Vinyasa in particular in post #4 here and the posts it links to. While there are no lower quality or less durable materials in the design since they introduced version 5 of the Prana mattresses … they still have about 3" of polyfoam in the top layers so you are sleeping more on polyfoam than on latex.
When you are considering a mattress in a higher budget range such as the Prana I would make some careful “value” comparisons with other latex mattresses that are in lower budget ranges. In some cases a mattress in this budget range may be “worth it” for a particular person that isn’t price sensitive and that has specific criteria that aren’t available in lower budget ranges but this would be unusual and in general I would need a very compelling reason that clearly indicated there was “enough” of a difference in “real life” compared to many other mattresses that may be just as suitable in terms of PPP, just as durable, and that are in lower budget ranges to justify the higher cost based on all the parts of your personal value equation that are most important to you.
Phoenix