Bell Super DH Speaker Helmet Mod

Heyzeus · April 4, 2019

I did a simple mod to my Bell Super DH to make it easier to listen to music while riding and still hear exterior noises like cars and people. Though fair warning if you have the volume up on these and are going fast and have wind noise, you won't hear your unicycle beep most likely if you push it past it's limits. So if listening to music, I highly suggest having alarms set up in wheel log, especially with the pebble watch and suggest being a bit more conservative with the speed alarms to be safe. Or turn the music down lower when going higher speeds.

Motivation for mod: Trying to keep earbuds in while putting the helmet on was a pain. Trying to keep the earbuds in a position where they didn't hurt my ears was a pain. Not to mention earbuds were a bit too isolating and so I was only wearing one in my right ear. All together it sucked and needed to change.

Speakers purchased: https://www.amazon.com/UCLEAR-Digital-Definition-Speakers-Compatible/dp/B00RW10WBC/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=helmet+speakers&qid=1554352556&s=gateway&sr=8-4

Here are some pictures of where I put them in the helmet: https://imgur.com/a/U4zv256

I put them in the highest and forwardmost position you can in the helmet, pushed right up against the cheek pads and where the chinbar piece meets the bottom of the top helmet.

With the chinbar removed:

Speaker Front and Back:

How I attached them:

The speakers come with some 3m sticky backed Velcro fuzzies the size of the speaker in the above picture. The speaker has the Velcro hooks and the sticky backed fuzzy round piece is what I stuck to the inside of my helmet (the speakers also come with some thicker foam pads like half a centimeter thick or so that one could use in other helmets to make them stick out more if they were too deep in the helmet)

You can see below that the attachment surface isn't flat and even. That foam curve is how the helmet comes, I didn't cut it out, so unless I wanted to go @Rehab1 and modify and make my own plastic piece to glue in there to give more surface area, then the surface area available for my point of attachment was limited.

But the speakers are light and so it doesn't need to be attached all around. The point of attachment is strong enough to hold it in place when not being worn, and when being worn my head is going to be putting enough pressure on it to keep them from coming loose. So far I haven't noticed them coming loose and the attachment seems plenty strong so yayy.

Where they are positioned, I don't notice them putting significant pressure on my ears or causing any annoyance or pain. My ears barely touch them, but I have small ears.

Right side:

Left Side:

Alternatively you could easily position them in these two positions, I didn't because the music didn't sound as good and in the first one it pushed against the back of my earlobes too much

Left side

Lastly I took a tiny drill bit and drilled two tiny holes in the back of my chin bar so that I could run a thin twist tie through so as to tie the wire out of the way so it wouldn't hit my neck while riding

Overall, pretty easy mod, speakers aren't bose quite comforts but they get loud enough to still hear the music when going ~40kmh (be careful of not hearing wheel beeps though), they sound as good as most sony/jvc etc. wired earbuds that you might get for 15-30 bucks at frys/microcenter/bestbuy whatever. So i'm overall satisfied with the sound quality and loudness, ymmv though.