But you would still need a FreeWire for each person on the bike and have those 7 pin cables plugged in. My attraction to the WHIM was having one unit to handle both riders.

 

I have the WHIM and the a pair HD 20S Evo. I like the stereo and love to ride and listen to good tunes. A couple of pages back, you will see the muffs I added to my half helmet that keeps the sound in my helmet and blocks out the world. Works very well. But I have been having hearing problems - of late.
I am not new to sound in helmet. I used Cardo Scala G9x for years. Before that, I would use BT headset and listen to radio on my phone.
I do wear these devices responsibly. Having retired from 4 yrs in the USMC and 16 years as a Nuke in Navy Subs, I don't want to ruin my hearing doing what I love most. I never blast the music. I keep it soft.

But last week, I got off my bike and was talking with a lady and I noticed that her voice sound like a kazoo!! There was a little echo inside my head of every word she said. Going home I made the mistake of listening but this time it was all talk radio. No music. When I got home and took off my helmet, I felt like my head was in a tin bucket.

When I first installed the WHIM, I used it with the Cardos, which I still have. The sound was mono, of course and we often just used the external speakers and talked helmet to helmet but I also would listen to FM radio, a feature of the headsets. No hearing problems. But the HD 20s Evo are scaring me.

What is different between the Cardo and the Evo is the Codec. AptX does all kinds of spectrum splitting for special effects and compression. My concern is that they may be spitting out a frequency below normal hearing I.e. below 20 kHz that could damage hearing. Some encoding is not for sound but strictly instructional to the other device such as Huffman-Coding. Remember, your helmet is not getting sound from your Boom 6.5. It is receiving instruction. The digital instruction tells the headset to create a sound. It is constantly telling it to create a whole shitload of sound. Yet some of that instruction could be damaging.

Has anyone else experienced hearing issues with the HD 20s Evo and the WHIM?

 

I have been using this setup for 3 or 4 weeks or more now. I mostly listen to XM radio while riding and I use 27DB noise reduction ear buds that I have been using for several years. I also wear a tight fitting 3/4 helmet and do everything I can to cut wind noise in addition to the noise reducing ear buds. I could not use speakers at all. I have a fairly moderate hearing loss in my right ear and a less than moderate in the left. My loss is all in the higher frequencies. I can hear the real low stuff pretty well. Anyway, I have not noticed an difference in this and my regular Sena 20S I was using before. Well nothing other than the stereo V mono. If I were you I would go to an Audiologist or a Ear Nose and Throat guy that does a lot of hearing loss work and get tested to have a baseline. Maybe someone else can report on a similar experience.

 

I just watched this in WHIM install video https://www.lawabidingbiker.com/whim-install/

Durring his install they disconnected the lead to the 7-pin plug for the wired headset and plugged the WHIM into the plug. Their was no accommodation for plugging the 7-Pin lead back into anything.

So I surmise that once the WHIM is install that you can no longer use wired headsets.

 

I think you might want to watch the video again. I did the install myself just using the enclosed instructions. Ryan didn't lift the gas tank but I did and still, the entire job took less than 45 minutes. But at no time did I touch the 7 PIN din connector and I did test the wired headset when done and can assure you it works, at least to the point of hearing the radio and accepting PPT commands. Since I only have one wired headset, I cannot vouch for rider to passenger.

And if you do the upgrade, do route the data cable under the gas tank. You want it stretched out along much of the bike because it also serves as an antenna.

 

What does it serve as an antenna for? Bluetooth reception? This is the first time I have heard that. I didn't route mine under the tank. Me and the wife don't seem to have an issue with talking and all that.

 

No. That 7-pin plug is just hanging around in the front under the cowling. There is nothing plugged into it.

You can still use your wired headset.

At least I can sitting in the front seat. Seems the pax plug no longer works. I have to get them to look at that because there is absolutely zero reason that should not work any more.

 

I got the impression that it was for the bluetooth but am not sure. But I did read in the instructions that it doubled as an antenna. It would seem that BT would be the one since the Boom already handles FM and SiriusXM and CB have their own.

 

I am set up with the WHIM, HD 20s EVO pair and the bike pairs with my Samsung Galaxy S8? It would be very useful if I could pass through commands to my phone. The Galaxy has "Bixby", a Samsung version of Siri.

Is there a way to talk to my phone in the normal configuration?

 

Thanks for the info. Ryan added his 7-pin plug to his Streetglide using the same port that the WHIM plugs into so he had to choose between WHIM and wired. It seems if you have an Ultra this port will still be empty so you can have wired and WHIM both.