I am not sure, I don't think any of us know. One of the hard things is that, what ever the handle says, what he is using might have been custom made for him so it could be almost anything. My guess is it is probably about the same speed as the Timo Boll ALC or even, perhaps, a little slower. But I certainly don't know.
I do think it is an all wood blade. All wood blades often have more feeling than carbon blades. Carbon does many good things but it deadens the vibrations which makes it harder to feel the ball on the surface of the blade. The combination composites (arylate-carbon, zylon-carbon) do give you a lot of control but it is still harder to feel the ball to use the control than with a wood blade which might give you as much dwell time and the ability to feel what you are doing with the ball while it is on the surface of the blade. The first player to win the World Championships with a blade that had carbon in it, I believe, was .... Zhang Jike. That means a lot of world champions using all wood blades when they won.
But, as I said above, I think when he changed his blade, something else happened that had nothing to do with the blade. I think, all of a sudden his confidence went up. Not because of the blade, but the blade was a signal that something had changed rather than the cause of the change.
