I have been running Cardo Scala Riders for years. First started using them for off road ATV setups. They have always "worked" for me but as you will soon find out nobody makes a 'perfect' wireless helmet com setup. Nobody. Which is really a shame.
The real limiting factor with self contained helmet wireless systems is the battery life. Too loud and they use too much power hence short battery life, not to mention they deafen you. Not loud enough, and you end up buying amplifiers, blowing speaker drivers, and cobbling things up trying to 'tune' them. That's the biggest gotcha out there. And quite honestly it's hard for me to advise here based on second hand knowledge, and that leads me into the second biggest gotcha with helmet com systems... speaker placement. I can't tell you how many reviews I've read where people are bitching about the scala riders not being loud enough. I learned early on that most, if not all of those folks just didn't have the speakers positioned right. One big contributing factor here is the helmets with pre-formed speaker recesses in the EPS foam liners. Those are crap. Even my 700$ Arai has them...and they suck. Not only are they not positioned right for my ear holes, they are recessed which means the speakers are not even farther away from my ears. Get a pair of head phones, and pull the cups even 1/8 of an inch away from your ears and listen to the difference.
If you get ANY setup, get anal with the speaker positioning, and make sure they are fastened down inside with some foam behind them to push them ever so gently into contact with your ears...dead center over your earholes. Mounting the ear pieces is the most misunderstood, under estimated part of the whole deal. Don't let someone else do it for you, don't settle for it's good enough, you have to get it dead right, and make sure it's secure enough that putting the helmet on and off won't eventually move them out of place... and DON'T let them push too hard into your ears because they will feel great for about 20 minutes. Just long enough to get on the highway, then they will start to kill you.
So lastly, I'll say the cardo's have done ok by me. I have 5 sets currently. My wife has them in her helmet, and my son has them in his. I also have about 2 generations back g4's, G9's and G9X. The fancy voice activation sucks. The bells and whistles are crap. Basic pair to phone, GPS, and eachother is randy, so don't expect ease of use. But generally speaking, once they are setup, they are setup. Starting G9's you have pc based setup apps and now even a phone app, which I admit, is nice. But at the end of the day, the g4's were fine.
Whatever you buy break your ass to get the mounting done right. Take the extra time to measure your earspots however you see fit, and know that you won't get it right the first time.I'm still trying to perfect the process. I wish someone offered a head molding process to get custom foam cheek pads formed with speaker pockets done right but alas, I'm probably 5 years ahead of the curve with that idea.
