After my first flight, I realized I’ll probably need to get a better headset. My current one has served me well for most of my flying so far, but the Velocity is a rather loud beast. Another builder a couple hangars down works for Bose, and he loaned me both Bose X and A20 headsets to try. I only found the X’s marginally better than my passives, but the A20’s were pretty good. Being 6’4″, tho, I don’t have a lot of headroom and a headset that didn’t have a over-the-head band would be nice. I’ve looked into the Clarity Aloft headsets and it seems that a lot of people like them. They are passive and use in-ear earphones that have foam sound isolation like those foam earplugs you roll up and stick in your ear canal.
It seems that the Clarity Aloft headset is relatively easy to make, so rather than pay the +$500 price tag, you can make your own set for <$100. I followed instructions documented here, but there are many websites that describe how to make these. Basically, you make some sort of wire frame that rests on your ears and holds the mike, and then get a set of noise isolating earphones.
For the wire frame, I used coat hangar wire that I covered with black surgical tubing. To get the surgical tubing over the coat hangar wire, coat the wire with a bit of dish soap. It slips on easily then the dish soap dries and fixes it on the wire. The surgical tubing makes a nice soft cover. Before slipping the tubing over the wire, I bent the wire into the proper shape. Just grab some google images of the Clarity Aloft headsets and you’ll see the basic shape you want to achieve. I just kept bending and adjusting until it felt right on my head.
For the mic, I grabbed the mic off an old headset. Its a rather bulky mic, but its an aviation mic that’s very short-range and directional. There was a hole thru the plastic case of the mic where I could slide it onto the coat hangar wire frame and secure it with heat shrink tubing, then cover it with the foam cover. Its a bit big, but not heavy, so it seems to work ok.
For the earphones, I bought a pair of Shure SE110’s off ebay ($60). You want to use the P-Series Comply Foam tips. I went to the Comply site and just looked at which earphones supported those tips. You can buy Comply tips for almost any earphones, but I think the P-Series are specific to only a few types and give the most noise isolation.
I see that many have just found a 1/4″ to 1/8″ adapter and plugged their earphones directly into the headphone jack of their panel. The issue here is that most aviation audio panels are expecting to see ~1000ohm impedance on the headset whereas most consumer-grade earphones are 8ohm. I tried plugging mine in directly and the sounded terrible. So, I used a transformer to do the impedance matching. Very easy, just grab this transformer from RadioShack and put it in a little project box. I used the mic/headset connectors from an old headset and ran them into the project box. Connect the blue/green wires of the transformer to the panel connector and the red/white wires to a 1/8″ jack to plug your earphones into. If your audio panel is mono, then just connect both sides of the stereo 1/8″ jack together. Leave the black wire disconnected. I also connected the mic wire from the headset to the panel jack inside the box.
To bundle the mic and earphone wires together and onto the wire headset frame, I cut short pieces of nylaflow tubing and split it down the middle to make little wire holders. I mounted the box beside the panel using some velcro tape.
I haven’t flown with the headset yet (hopefully today), but it worked great when I turned on the radio in the hangar. Once the foam on the earplugs expands and seals, it seems to really cut the noise down. Best tho, is that the headset is very light and does not eat up any valuable headroom.
Here’s a few pictures of the headset:
