PIEPS

Our About page makes a promise: the recall response tells you more about a company than the product page ever will. PIEPS is where this site keeps that promise in full, because if you are trusting your burial to a beacon, you deserve the whole story before the spec sheet.

The DSP recall, plainly

On April 12, 2021, the CPSC announced the recall of the PIEPS DSP Pro, DSP Pro Ice and DSP Sport avalanche transceivers — about 66,100 units in the US and 12,500 in Canada, manufactured between 2013 and 2020 in Austria.

The hazard was the one an avalanche beacon exists to never have: the mode switch could move out of send unexpectedly if not locked or properly secured — meaning a buried skier’s beacon could be transmitting nothing while their partners searched. The CPSC notice records 65 incident reports, one death, and one injury report. The remedy was to stop using the beacon and obtain a replacement hardcase carrying system that keeps the switch locked in send.

Two more things belong in the record. PIEPS maintained that its testing showed the devices complied with the applicable standards — and issued the corrective action anyway. And the loudest criticism, from within the backcountry community, was not that a defect can exist, but that the response came too slowly after earlier accident reports had raised the alarm. Both statements are true at once, and a buyer weighing this brand should hold both.

That is the story. We won’t sand it down, and we won’t pretend the current catalog is disqualified by it either. What a recall like this buys, at terrible cost, is a company — and an industry — redesigning around the failure: the current generations lock differently, and the carrying-system thinking changed across the category.

Who PIEPS is now

PIEPS is Austrian avalanche safety with roots dating to 1972 — the name itself is onomatopoeia for a beacon’s chirp — restructured as a GmbH in 2006 and acquired by Black Diamond in 2012.

It is not a Black Diamond brand any more, and a lot of writing hasn’t caught up. On 14 July 2025 Clarus, Black Diamond’s parent, completed the sale of PIEPS and the JetForce avalanche-pack intellectual property for €7.8 million — about $9.1 million including cash and debt — thirteen years after buying it for roughly €8.0 million. The executive chairman framed it as “simplifying the business and rationalizing our product categories.”

Who owns PIEPS today is not public. Clarus described the buyer only as a private investment firm and named nobody. PIEPS’s own About page is quieter still: it lists “2012: Change of ownership” without saying to whom, and says nothing about 2025 at all. We are not going to fill that gap with a guess. For a company whose product is trusted with a burial, an unnamed owner is a fact worth knowing rather than a detail worth smoothing — the same reason we publish this page’s recall history in full.

One consequence worth being precise about: the strategic review Clarus opened in May 2026 hangs over Black Diamond. It does not touch PIEPS, which had already been sold.

The current line is the Pro IPS at the top, the Powder BT mainstream three-antenna beacon, probes in carbon and aluminum, and shovels with blades sized for debris that sets like concrete. The direct competitor is Mammut’s Barryvox — and if the recall history has cost PIEPS your trust, that is the honest place we’d send you. Beacon buyers compare trust before features, and they are right to.

The kit is three things, trained

A transceiver alone digs no one out. The purchase is beacon, probe and shovel, and the skill is practiced together — a signal search that ends without a probe strike and fast shoveling is a eulogy with electronics. Whatever brand’s beacon is on your chest, the practice sessions are the actual life-safety equipment.

Where PIEPS fits

Backcountry skiers and riders assembling the three-piece kit, eyes open, comparing against Barryvox on interface and group-check behavior as much as price.

Not for: anyone who wants the least complicated trust story in the category — that buyer goes to Mammut, and this page just told them so. Not for resort skiers who will never cross a boundary rope; the money belongs in lessons first.

Why we rate them — carefully

The current products compete on merit. The Pro IPS generation is a modern beacon family, designed after the hardest possible lesson.

The category is better for the scrutiny. The DSP episode changed how the whole industry thinks about switch security, and PIEPS absorbed that change rather than exiting.

And the caveat stands in full. One death is in the record. This page led with it, because a safety brand’s history is part of its specification — and because a site that promised to read recall responses owes you this one unabridged.

When a buyer has read all of the above and still chooses PIEPS, they’ve chosen it the only way this site endorses: informed.