Here's an interesting review of the Scala. Bottom line appears to be it's fine for GPS and talking between riders or on the phone, but it's too high pitched for cruising and jammin' to Rock and Roll.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Great Communications, Weak Music, October 27, 2009
By Fred Anonymous Smith
I have mixed feelings about Cardo's Scala Rider MultiSet Q2. The bike-to-bike communications feature was highly desirable since my wife & myself ride separate machines. This feature works well between the two headsets (preset at the factory) and is very easy to use. The Scala Rider also works well with my TomTom Rider 2 GPS, with setup just as the owners manual described. Finally, my Samsung cellular phone works through the TomTom Rider, with setup for that just as the TomTom owners manual described.
Installing the headsets onto the helmets was easy enough. After some trial and error, discovered the easiest way to accomplish this was by removing the headset's back plate, using a screwdriver to carefully separate the foam lining (held with adhesive tape) from the helmet shell, inserting the back plate into the helmet, and then reattaching the headset. Even on our half-helmets, the boom mic (longer than earlier Cardo headsets) was easily able to reach the desired position.
That said, I'm not nearly as impressed with either the MP3 input or FM radio. Given the high-pitched speakers with absolutely no bass (good for voice, not music), nobody is going to be jamming down the highway listening to music from these. Homemade spacers to position the speakers closer to the ears did help considerably, but I truly doubt anything will make these speakers sound all that great with music.
Setting up the headset's FM radio was surprisingly difficult. The radio tunes by scanning until a station is found. Afterwards, one button stops the scan on that station and another stores the station into memory if desired. Otherwise, scan continues after a pause of a few seconds. Without a frequency display, finding a specific station is not easy since one really doesn't know whether to tune upwards or downwards from the current position. Further, the headset's hard-to-push buttons (pressed many times) were eventually painful on the fingers.
To make matters worse, none of my favorite local stations (fairly strong signals) were even detected by the built-in radio. I eventually used a small FM transmitter (placed just inches from the headset) to locate those stations long enough to store them into memory. Sadly, once the FM radio was set up, reception was extremely poor, with considerable noise and static. I eventually gave up and switched to the FM radio built into my MP3 player.
The MP3 player input feature is not much better than the FM radio. Even with the MP3 player's volume control turned to maximum, the volume (loudness) is far too weak. The headset does not amplify the MP3 player input and there are no tone adjustments on the headset. Of course, nothing (even turning MP3 player's bass all the way up and treble all the way down) could really improve the sound quality from the tinny speakers. Actually, given the poor sound from those speakers, perhaps it's a good thing the volume is so sorely lacking.
Since I mentioned an FM transmitter, let me also comment on that. For a truly wireless arrangement, I initially tried connecting the MP3 player to such a transmitter and then listening to MP3 music through the headset's FM radio. However, after trying several transmitters (Belkin, etc) on each of the two included headsets, it just didn't work (fading, hiss & uncomfortably loud static). The headset's FM radio just appears too insensitive to reliably receive such a signal. A transmitter deploying a wire antenna helped, but even that was noisy and faded often. I ultimately gave up and just plugged the MP3 player directly into the headset.
In the end, after much fiddling with volume and audio adjustments, I achieved what could only be described as moderately comfortable background music - something to listen to while riding, but not much else. Again, no cruising through the countryside while jamming to loud music. However, I should point out that my bike has a windshield and is very quiet. Someone with a louder machine (loud mufflers, wind noise, etc) might not be able to achieve even decent background music. On the plus side, the voice communications feature works well in noisier conditions.
So, in conclusion, three features (communications, GPS, & phone) work well, one feature (FM radio) works horribly, and one feature (MP3) is marginal. Had I purchased this setup only for the latter two, I would have immediately returned it for a refund. There are clearly much better options for both music and FM radio. The first three features prevented that return. However, as it is, I can only feel lukewarm about the Scala Rider MultiSet Q2 since it really doesn't fully provide everything desired and promised
