Hi Gooberboi,
[quote]I am coming from an Amerisleep Liberty mattress and was wondering how does the Tuft & Needle stacks up against it? From all the reviews I looked over. Many has stated that it runs a little firmer than normal. Personally, I don’t mind but my wife tends to prefer plush to medium plush.
Hoping to find out more about this mattress![/quote]
I would doubt that any of the forum members have slept on both mattresses for an extended period of time but even if they had their experience may be very different from yours.
While other people’s comments about the knowledge and service of a particular business can certainly be very helpful … I would also be very cautious about about using other people’s experiences or reviews on a mattress (either positive or negative) as a reliable source of information or guidance about how you will feel on the same mattress or how suitable or how durable a mattress may be for you and in many if not most cases they can be more misleading than helpful because any mattress that would be a perfect choice for one person or even a larger group of people may be completely unsuitable for someone else to sleep on (even if they are in a similar weight range) and reviews in general certainly won’t tell you much if anything about the quality, durability, or “value” of a mattress for any particular person (see post #13 here).
There are no “standard” definitions or consensus of opinions for firmness ratings and different manufacturers can rate their mattresses very differently than others so a mattress that one manufacturer rates as being a specific firmness could be rated very differently by another manufacturer.
Different people can also have very different perceptions of firmness and softness compared to others as well and a mattress that feels firm for one person can feel like “medium” for someone else or even “soft” for someone else (or vice versa) depending on their body type, sleeping style, physiology, their frame of reference based on what they are used to, and their individual sensitivity and perceptions. There are also different types of firmness and softness that different people may be sensitive to that can affect how they “rate” a mattress as well (see post #15 here) so different people can have very different opinions on how two mattresses compare in terms of firmness and some people may rate one mattress as being firmer than another and someone else may rate them the other way around. This is all relative and very subjective and is as much an art as a science.
In addition to this the Amerisleep Liberty is a memory foam mattress that is in a completely different category from Tuft & Needle which uses a high performance polyfoam in the comfort layers which is a more resilient material than memory foam (which has little to no resilience or “bounce” at all) so even if they have a similar firmness level they will “feel” very different from each other.
There is more information about the type and quality/durability of the materials in the Tuft & Needle mattress in post #2 here in the simplified choice mattress topic and in posts #2 and #6 here.
The materials in the Tuft & Needle mattress are higher quality and more durable than the materials in the Amerisleep Liberty which uses lower density 1.5 lb polyfoam in the transition and base layers which could be a weak link in their mattress in terms of durability but the durability of a material has very little to do with it’s firmness or how it “feels”.
When you can’t test a mattress in person then the most reliable source of guidance is always a more detailed phone conversation with a knowledgeable and experienced retailer or manufacturer that has your best interests at heart and who can help “talk you through” the specifics of their mattresses and the properties and “feel” of the materials they are using (fast or slow response, resilience, firmness etc) and whether a specific mattress may be a good “match” for you based on the information you provide them, any local testing you have done or mattresses you have slept on and liked or other mattresses you are considering that they are familiar with, and the “averages” of other customers that are similar to you. They will know more about “matching” their specific mattress designs and firmness levels to different body types, sleeping positions, and preferences (or to other mattresses that they are familiar with) than anyone else.
Like the other simplified choice mattresses they also have a great trial period so you can test them in your bedroom instead of a showroom with little risk outside of the time you spend trying it (or returning/donating it if it doesn’t work out as well as you hoped) but the “bottom line” is that the only way to know how firm a mattress feels for you (regardless of how firm it may feel for anyone else) or how it compares to another mattress (again regardless of how it may compare for someone else) will be based on your own personal experience.
Phoenix