The piezo system in the Merlin IV of 1998 was prototyped in 1995 with the K2 Four, as part of the first generation of K2's shaped skis. The Four wasn't marketed as a race ski but it's the model Bode Miller used when he won three of four races to score the U.S. national junior championship at Sugarloaf in March 1996. That performance simply killed off the previous generation of "straight" race skis. The Merlin was made in the same mold as the Four. The piezo actually came out of an unpublicized research partnership K2 had with Boeing -- the aircraft company had come up with this solid-state electromechanical device to damp vibrations in carbon-fiber ailerons and rudders for jet fighters. In adopting the piezo, K2's engineers and marketing geniuses figured that as long as they were converting vibration energy to electric current, they might as well add an LED light to signal that the system actually functioned. It was a cute idea but you could only see the light winking indoors or while skiing at night maybe. Anyway, no one outside the factory really understood the concept, so it was quietly dropped after the Merlin IV and replaced with a "pod" damping system on the next generation of K2's high-performance skis.