I love motorcycle comms systems. I’ve had a Cardo PackTalk Edge for a while now, and a PackTalk Black before that — for as long as I’ve seriously ridden bikes, I’ve had a comm unit. I love having music in my helmet, I love the ability to make phone calls, I love being able to hear my turn-by-turn directions when I’m going somewhere I’ve never been before.
Yet, I hate the install process. Putting a comm system into a helmet is one of the worst parts of owning bike gear, and it’s always something I dread. Today marked another comm install, my first in a while, and again I’m forced to ask: Why does this have to be so frustrating?
Last night I rode home from the climbing gym in the rain, with the visor on my Arai XD-4 up the whole time to keep it from fogging. Today I have another rainy ride planned, which meant it was finally time to do the thing I’ve been dreading for weeks now: Move my Cardo from the Arai into the AGV K6 I recently got in for testing.
To be clear, my complaints here aren’t unique to AGV and have little to do with Cardo. I have helmets from four manufacturers in my bedroom right now, spread across the price spectrum, and only one had a comm install process that was at all efficient. The K6 is as bad for comms as my old Shoei RF-1200, and as bad as my Icon Domain will be whenever I get a spare comm to put there for pillions. It’s an industry standard install process, and it sucks so bad.
Mounting a comm base on a helmet is fine enough. The unit itself will usually end up in some slightly inconvenient place — too high up on the AGV and Arai, too far back on the Shoei — but those are reasonable accommodations for helmet aerodynamics. I’m not expecting helmet manufacturers to take third-party comms into account when shaping their shells, those can be designed for safety and quietness as they are.
No, my complaint is with helmets’ interior pads and liners. They’re built without consideration for wires running between the comm unit and the speakers and mic, which makes getting everything into position a major hassle. Add in the finnicky clips and snaps that every helmet maker uses, and you end up constantly positioning and repositioning and fiddling with a helmet to get everything close enough, before eventually throwing in the towel and settling for “everything is inside the helmet.”
For this K6, installing my Cardo meant cutting out part of the rigid skirt around the cheek pads. This is the part that actually clips in on the shell side of the EPS foam, and it’s routinely designed without any kind of channel for cables. You have to make that channel yourself, and then have an absolute pain of a time getting the skirt back in place.
Then, of course, you have to figure out the internal wiring. Comm harnesses have multiple plugs for multiple sets of mics and speakers, which means you need to find ways to secure a full 3.5-mm jack and plug somewhere in your comfort liner without it jabbing your neck. This is one situation where I’d genuinely prefer some sort of proprietary ribbon cable connector, because at least that could lay flat against the foam.
Locate base on shell. Mount base. Pull out pads. Mark wiring location on skirt. Cut skirt. Mount velcro for speakers and mic. Mount speakers and mic. Place pads back in. Skirt doesn’t fit right. Place pads back in with a different orientation. Do that three more times until everything fits. Realize one of your speakers fell out sometime in that process. Slam your head into your couch. Pull out liner. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you’ve finally got everything in there. Why is this still how it works?
Some helmets, I admit, offer a solution. My own Icon Domain has a handy cutout for a proprietary comms system, a Sena unit that slots right in easily — assuming you have an Icon Domain, because it doesn’t fit anything else even in Icon’s own lineup. Now you’re spending $350 for tech that only fits your one helmet, so you’re stuck upgrading both when your comm dies or your EPS ages out and you find the Domain has been replaced with some updated design. Meanwhile my $360 Cardo is now on its third helmet, across two different brands. If needed, I could put it on another, the way I did today with the AGV. I could even swap it to the Domain, where it would play nice with my Cardo-owning riding friends, unlike the Sena.
You may have noticed a conspicuous absence in my list of helmets that suck to install comms into. That’s because both Arai XD-4s I’ve had, with their unique and weird pad design, have been considerably easier than any other helmet I’ve put comms into. Maybe it’s aided by the practice of having had to do a second install after I crashed my first helmet, but Arai’s interior layout just makes wiring and speaker locating easier. It’s a shame you can only get that marginal improvement for Arai money, though, and it’s a nonstarter for anyone whose head shape doesn’t quite fit the brand.
Modern helmets may have cutouts for speakers, but they still aren’t truly built to have comms installed in them. No brand that I’ve yet found has made the process easy, and any brand that tries only ends up with a proprietary cash grab — even worse than the frustration of a universal unit install. From the best of the best to the worst of the worst, helmet makers just aren’t thinking about Cardo or Sena. Is it a safety thing? Is there no money in being the helmet manufacturer that accommodates comms? Why does this process have to be so much of a pain?
