The Future of Motorcycle Audio: Trends in Communication Tech

Great communication begins with connection. Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. In today's episode, I'll look at the state of motorcycle audio and communication, some trends that are occurring and what the future might hold for motorcycle audio and communication. so let's get talking a little bit about some of the audio quality. Now I'm going to, I'm going to talk about motorcycle audio in a very broad spectrum. So this can speakers that are on your motorcycle. If you have one of the larger touring as well as headset And in general, most of these type of setups to be frank, kind of crummy quality in the beginning. The speakers tended to be these sort of paper cones. They weren't really very crisp in terms of the delivery. They tended not to have a decent amount of power. So they kind of sounded almost like an AM It was not the most amazing part of that comes in, especially if we think of for the headset range, a lot of these headsets were really intended more as communication devices. So prioritizing something that could make audio from of vocal perspective, sound pretty clear made sense. as we've continued to develop these over time, both on the individual speakers that are on motorcycles in terms of the fairing as well as the headset audio, the quality has increased dramatically when it comes to audio We now quality speakers in both of these, yeah. And you can listen to music in your headset and it will sound just like you're listening to a very good pair of headphones. Now, obviously, if you're talking about a studio grade headphone, it's not going to be up to that level. You're not spending, you know, $200 on a headset and then getting the equivalent of a four or $500 pair of headphones. But in terms of the drivers that are part of the headset in there, they're substantially better quality than we used to have in the And this makes it where the experience of listening to music as you're riding is a far more enjoyable, it doesn't sound like this little crackling, crinkly sound that you've got with an AM radio type of a And I just keep thinking back to like, you know, those old little transistor radios that you made from like the Radio Shack kits back when I was a kid. That's what most of the headsets sounded like back in the past. Now they sound absolutely phenomenal. And one of the things that we start to see with some of these headsets, especially, and perhaps to a lesser extent on some of the built in speakers, I think there's been more innovation happening in the headset realm rather than on built in speakers, if you will, they got to a point where they said, Hey, we've got some decent speakers, and that's good. And they kind of leave it at that. And maybe they bump up the amps every once in a while, or they have more wattage that you've got driving the individual speakers. Now you've got four speakers instead of just the two. That's good, but you're still fighting something where you have extraneous noise. So they're never going to really have the same sort of quality level that you're going to get into something that is contained in a headset And this is where I think this next bit of technology that you're starting to see emerge into a few different headsets today is really interesting because as we're riding along on a one of the big challenges that you'll have is a lot of external noise. You'll have the wind that's rushing by you, you'll have the engine noise, you'll have the exhaust noise, and all of these are effectively blocking your ability hear the signal that you really wish to have. And whether that signal is your GPS directions, whether that signal a siren from a emergency vehicle, or whether that signal is just hearing the intercom from a friend of yours who's either in the pillion or on another bike, having a reduction in the background noise level will make it easier And what we're starting to see with a few headsets today is they're now adding active noise canceling. What this fundamentally does is if you think of the wave form that exists for a bit of noise, what the speaker does is it sends the inverse of that. So instead of the wave being, let's say in the upper part, and then it goes down to the lower, you'll actually have a complete reversal of that wave, which cancels the audio out. So effectively, all that noise is removed from what you're hearing, and you can focus a little bit more on the active signal, your voice, your music, whatever it is that you're trying to listen to, you can actually have a much clearer sound. And this is an awesome, awesome add-on to some of these headsets. Now the other area that I want to discuss with this is really more on, not so much the passive listening that you would get of listening to music on the speakers that are built into your bike or into the headset. I'm really on this sort of the two-way communication aspect that we have available in most of these, and really I'm going to focus the beginning with this on intercom. Now there were a lot of systems for some of the older, older bikes way back when where you had to buy this huge convoluted intercom system, and that was how you were able to communicate. It might have even been just physically wired between you and your pillion rider. And it made sense to have, but it was cumbersome. It was a lot of wiring and it didn't make it as streamlined as it is today. So most of the intercoms that we see on the market today really focus on using Bluetooth. Now, Bluetooth has been around for decades. They continue bump up the version number as they add in more capability. They lower the power requirements. They increase the range, all the things that they continue to do with Bluetooth. this allows you to communicate with another device completely wirelessly. There is no huge setup of wires between you and a pillion. It makes it super, super easy. And if you need to connect that intercom or that headset, let's say, to a GPS or to your phone, the same thing. It's going to connect wirelessly. It just makes your life a thousand times simpler than it would be if you had to physically wire it together. now, when we think of an intercom, if you're talking speaking with a pillion well, they're not all that far away. They're a few feet away from you at the most. So Bluetooth as a range, which generally tends to be about 10 meters or about 30 to 33 is going to be absolutely fine. You're not going to have any issues with that whatsoever. However, when you start talking about bike to intercom, this is where Bluetooth starts to fall apart a little bit. It is not going to have the same range that you would need. And unless the bike is literally riding near you within, let's say, 10 feet, if you're staggered formation, well, that might work for you. But beyond that, it's really easy for it to fall off. And this is where some of the experiences of riders, where they poo poo, some of the helmet, you know, communicators and say the intercom sucks. It's always losing connection. And of course, intercom that's with Bluetooth isn't necessarily self-healing. So now you've got to stop, pull over, reconnect the Bluetooth to the other rider. It just became a real nightmare. And so what a lot of the headset manufacturers have done is they've started to incorporate this new way of connecting wirelessly between each headset. And in general, this is now done as a mesh setup. And the cool thing about mesh is that what it's designed to do is to allow different devices to connect to the mesh and disconnect rather seamlessly. So it will just automatically heal and bring those connections back in. So you could have a mesh of 10, 20 different riders and it will just seamlessly work much, much easier than you had in the And the beauty of this is that they have a bit more range than you would have with pure Bluetooth between individual headsets. But where they also get really smart is they can piggyback the signal. So let's say that you're riding as the lead bike in the front of a group ride and you're connected with mesh to the rider directly behind you. Well, maybe they get a little further behind you. Maybe they're 50 feet behind you. Well, the mesh can still handle that range. No problem. But the trailing rider, maybe you have 10 bikes with you. Well, the trailing rider might be four or 500 feet behind you. Well, if you only have a hundred foot range on your wireless, they're not going to hear anything. But what's cool about what the mesh does is it basically retransmits the signal from that second rider to the third rider and then the third rider to the fourth and the fourth to the fifth and so on. So you can actually have a really extended range. this is really, really impactful for you. And most of the modern stuff actually has more than that hundred foot range I was alluding to. Most of them claim they can have up to about a mile of range. Now, the thing is when you hear that number and you go, oh, no problem. We'll ride a mile away from the person in front of me. Pause for a moment. We need to do a little bit of a reality check onto this because that is a theoretical range based on pure line of sight. So if I had two devices, the headsets, and they were exactly one mile away from one another and I could see them perfectly, there was no hills in the way, there were no trees, there were no other obstacles, you could get that one mile of range. But that doesn't ever happen. Maybe if you're riding on a flat desert highway, that might be the truth. But in the real world, that's not usually it. We usually have curves. You usually have trees along the side of the road. You might have other vehicles that are blocking the So your real world range is much less, which is why I kind of say like, hey, you might get 100, 200 feet. It's kind of a more realistic range with all of the other interference that you might have. But with the mesh, you can extend the real world range out to a larger thing. So you might have a mile of real world range with a group that's large enough because of that feeling that you have. So it's something that I think is really, really cool. here's the problem with the mesh systems. And this really comes down to interoperability. There's two main manufacturers that are out in the headset. And there's other ones too. But the two biggest ones is Sena and Cardo. And the problem is each one of them have their own mesh system. And they work very, very well within their own environment. So if you and all of your friends have Senas, they're going to work great. If you and your friends all have Cardo's, it's going to work great. But if you've got one rider that the other well, now I've got to worry about interoperability. the thing is that the way that most of these systems work as a fallback is that they'll come back into a Bluetooth connectivity. Because Bluetooth is more of a universal connection, whereas the mesh systems are proprietary to each manufacturer. So now I have Bluetooth myself and the one other rider who is not in there. Well, now I have the same problems that I had with Bluetooth back in the beginning. If I get more than about 30 feet away from them, they've got no connectivity. And again, because it's not part of the mesh, it's not self-healing. So if I lose that connectivity, I kind of have to stop and reconnect to be able to get them back onto the group channel. So it's not an ideal situation. And so what both Sena and Cardo have started to release now is another way that we can extend this and even a way to longer range communication amongst riders, even if you don't have, let's say, five or 10 riders in a group for that really long distance. And this is where they're using what's called cellular-based IP telephony. What this means, I mean, it sounds like a fairly technical word, but basically what we're doing is it's an internet protocol that we're communicating over and we're passing the audio signal as little packets of data. Just like when you make a cell phone call, that little stuff is communicating over little packets of data to the other tower and then to whatever device it's going to. Well, I've got the same premise here now, but going over communication. So think of what you do with like your zoom call, for example, that's essentially the same thing. It's IP making a call. Well, now I have this connection going on between these different devices. The app is running on each phone and therefore the app, which is connected through Bluetooth to your headset, is actually then piggybacking the audio sound that you're trying to make to your other rider over IP. It's going across your cell phones data network to the other rider and connecting. Sounds awesome. And in fact, what you have there is infinite range because it doesn't matter that you are in close proximity because you're going over the internet data and all of the cell towers that will exactly move that data around will continue to do so. But again, you still run into another problem where all the fun roads are tends not to have a lot of cell coverage. And if you don't have cell coverage, you don't have the cellular based IP telephony either. So it's a way to kind of work around it, but it's not really fully solving it. But it is a cool thing that they have. And if you're in an area where maybe it's a little bit more built up, there's a little bit cell towers in the range. If you were, for example, riding on a highway, a lot of highways tend to have cell towers pretty consistent amongst them. You could probably stretch out between your lead rider and your tail rider pretty far and use this cellular based IP to be able to connect. And since it can work across you'll obviously have to use the same app, but at least the headsets can be connected into there. Now you've got more ways to be able to have some interoperability. And that's just fine. But again, it will only work in those specific environments where you have cellular connectivity. So what I'd really love to both Sena and Cardo and some of the other manufacturers try to do as well, is really come up with a industry standard for what mesh could be. So I don't have a Cardo flavor of the mesh. I don't have a Sena flavor of the mesh. I don't have a insert other brand here version of the mesh. I've got a standard mesh connectivity, kind of like what we have with Bluetooth, that allows me to be able to integrate with all of them. Now I get all the benefits of that mesh that we had on a single brand, but I can work with any other rider. You don't have to pre-plan in advance. Oh, Bob's got a Sena and George has a Cardo and Frank has a Cardo and Harry has a Sena. So now like what do we do? We have kind of a split between both, but not any sort of plurality where we say, here's who we're going to connect to. But if the mesh actually worked amongst the different brands, you'd be in a very, very different situation. So I'd love to see that as an option for where we may see in the future. And I'm hopeful that it can come. Yes, there's always a little bit trying to do a bit of vendor lock-in or the peer pressure that encourages you to buy the same brand that your friends all have. And that's where we are today. But realistically, if you have the meshes interoperable, the need to have the same specific brand goes away. and now what I can do is I can focus on the headset that makes the most sense for me. Maybe the user interface, I like better on one brand versus another, or I like the way that I can manage my setup on the app from them much easier. This is, I think, where you're going to start to see some differentiation and really become the next catalyst for where we may see with headset communication. Now, the other thing I want to talk with some of the communication that we do within motorcycles what do you use it for? I mean, oftentimes, let's say that you're in a group ride, the lead rider might give you a little bit of a heads up. Hey, we've got traffic up ahead. It's really going to slow down. So the riders behind are aware, or there's a huge oil spill on the middle of the road, or there's a of grass or sand or gravel or whatever it is that's in the middle of the road, that should be an obstacle that we want to notify everyone in the back about. Or maybe there's a cop and there's a speed check, and you want to notify them construction, whatever it ends up being. Well, there's actually some effort that's coming in today of a way to allow communication, what they call vehicle to vehicle communication. Where they can communicate this not so much in an audio format of saying "Hey, slow down up ahead", but is literally a API that can say, "Hey, we're going to send the data about what the event is to the other vehicles that are in the surrounding area." So this isn't necessarily a motorcycle specific thing, this is just a vehicle-to-vehicle communication. And there's a company called Bosch that's aiming to do this with a new system that they have come out and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. And they're actually, Bosch specifically, is doing this for motorcycling, so they're making the units as small as they can, but they are meant to integrate with some of the similar systems that exist in regular cars and trucks. Now what would be really cool with this is obviously you could have some warning that pops up onto your display on the motorcycle would be one way to do it, but you could also have an audio prompt that says, "Hey, warning construction ahead, or warning speed check ahead", whatever it is, and that can communicate as So now some of the things that we may have relied upon headsets for happening within a group ride, well what if you're riding solo, but you are near other vehicles? The other vehicles can act like your fellow riding group give you an alert of, "Hey, there's traffic up ahead, or there's construction, or a speed check, or whatever it ends up being." That can give you a warning. This, I think, could be really, really cool as another envelope for making it easier for you to have an awareness and situational awareness of what's going on as you're riding. Now, obviously, if you're riding in the fun roads where there's not a lot of the odds that you're going to get a heads up on some, one of these events, goes down because A, you need to have a vehicle which supports vehicle to up in front of and it has to communicate within a reasonable range to you. So that's where you run into a problem, but realistically, often times on some of these sort of smaller or back roads, you don't have as much speed checks, let's say, as you would on a major highway, because there's fewer people for them to catch. it may not be as big of a deal as you might think at first glance, but I do think it's interesting that we have this as a technology that's starting to become available for us and could be really cool. So let's wrap up. We covered how audio quality on headsets used to barely match an AM But today we've got really high quality, almost studio quality that's coming into our headset today. systems are even adding active noise cancelling to remove the wind noise and the audio that you want have come even more apparent. We also discussed intercoms moving from the basic Bluetooth to a full self healing mesh. they're even allowing some interoperability between brands with basic Bluetooth and even cellular IP telephony. could we even see mesh working across brands? I think that would be really awesome to see. And finally, we discussed some vehicle to vehicle communication systems that might give you an automated heads up to hazards that are further up the road. So my question is, what do you think is the most critical feature for motorcycle audio and communication? Share your thoughts through the text to show link in the show notes or leave a voicemail at throttleandroast.com slash voicemail. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.