Motorcycle Helmet Speakers

After my ride to Tobermoray, I knew I would be bored silly with parts of the ride on my upcoming Big Trip. As the Big Trip is costing me a few pennies, I knew that a state-of-the-art helmet sound system was out of the question. All I needed was a couple of speakers to fit in the rather deep ear cavities in my helmet. Not too much to ask.

A quick look on the Internet proved that I wasn’t only one who wanted tunes in my head and not coming from my none-existent fairing speakers. I’d never use those speakers even if I had them, as I don’t believe in polluting other people’s peace and quiet. I hate listening to other people’s noise, so I won’t subject them to mine.

I found a site that suggested buying an amplifier and then clipping ear buds into the helmet. While that’s an alternative to not having tunes, there had to be something better. I pondered the problem and then I remembered I have an old pair of earphone I had bought from Radio Shack for about $20 in 2001. The clip to hold it over my head is broken and they are useless. The foam padding is also slowly disintegrating, so the earphones will leave a trail of foam pieces whenever used, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out.

I removed the overhead clip and, fortunately, my Gmax helmet has loads of ear room. In fact it has so much room that I’d put about an inch of hard foam in them to cut down on the road noise (not too sure if that worked or not). The earphones were a bit of a tight squeeze, but they fit in to the helmet perfectly and the sound is fantastic.

If you want speakers for you motorcycle helmet, go to Radio Shack (or The Source as it’s now called in Canada) and pick up some earphones. I’d suggest you take your helmet with you to guess-timate the size. But, for say $30 (inflation), I don’t think you can go wrong. The only fancy thing I’m missing is an in-line volume control.

I’m not going to bother with another RAM mount for the iPod. I don’t feel comfortable with it out in the heat of the day and in direct sunlight for hours on end. It will fit nicely into my tank bag. When it rains, I can easily (I hope) disconnect the iPod, put the rain cover over the tank bag and then tuck the earphone wires into my riding jacket pocket.

If I’m on a ride where I don’t want to listen to music, I can also easily remove the earphones, as they are a press fit into the helmet.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's ride when I will definitely try out the "new" speakers.

Pictured below are the earphones assembled and then with the head clip removed. I couldn’t get a half decent shot of the earphones in the helmet.