Long-Term Harley-Davidson Road Glide Special Gets A Sound System Upgrade and Tires | DOIN’ TIME

WRIST: Andy Cherney MSRP (2015): $23,699 MILES: 14,579 MPG: 40 MODS: New Dunlop tires, BOOM! audio wiring harness/plug, helmet headset, saddlebag hardware (recall)

Three days before Sturgis I found myself sitting at the Salem Harley dealership with a dozen or so other procrastinators, all of us hoping to tie up any loose ends before hitting the long and occasionally brutal haul out to the Holy Land—Sturgis.

Among the parts in play on the Harley-Davidson Road Glide Special are new tires, but unfortunately, Harley offers few options to replace the stock Dunlop D407 and 408 blackwalls, unless I wanted to change tire sizes (and remember, I'm limited to H-D-approved equipment by a loan agreement that makes the Magna Carta look like a pre-schooler's to-do list). Soooo, I'm staying with the same tires, which, for their part, have worn fine and give the big Hawg good handling. There are lots of touring guys who'd love to get 12K out of a tire; and the service tech who swapped the buns said I still had a couple thousand miles left.

The BOOM! Audio and Music Communications Kit (harley-davidson.com; $190) I’d ordered had arrived too, so I brought it along with me to Salem Harley-Davidson. The plug-in wiring harness allows you to connect the BOOM! Audio headset (also just received), or any standard seven-pin DIN headset, to tap into the infotainment system’s various hands-free audio and communication features.

At the dealer, I also learned there was another recall announcement recently issued for certain 2014 and 2015 Touring models—including the FLTRXS, the unpronounceable internal name for the Road Glide Special. According to the NHTSA, a spring wire in the saddlebag-mounting receptacle may not maintain adequate tension to keep the bag in place, and it could, presumably, disengage and go cartwheeling down the road. Not good. The service manager let me know they'd be installing new hardware to replace the faulty receptacles. (See the Road Glide recall announcement HERE)

The tire replacement took a little over 2 hours, but with mounting, balancing and labor, the whole service totaled a whopping $727. Some of that is the dealer charging full pop for the tires, but some was the BOOM! harness install. Even though it’s touted as a “plug-in” on Harley's website, installing the harness required the removal of the Road Glide’s outer and inner fairing, fuel tank, seat and other components. That ate up another 2 hours of tech time, so it was late afternoon by the time I found myself hauling ass back to home base to plug in and set up the BOOM! headset (it comes with a software CD which you can upload to the bike, but I had the dealer just flash it instead).

Helmet installation of the BOOM! is as straightforward as it gets, with plastic clamshell clips tightened via screws to clamp the whole thing to the helmet lip. A separate connector piece is required to accept the 7-pin DIN plug on the H-D headset. My local dealer installed the connector on the fuel tank panel.

The speakers fit inside my Shoei Neotec’s ear pockets, though just barely; speaker diameter is on the large side and I had to really dig in there, and to get them flush, had to trim away a bit of helmet lining. Also, the external foam covers are thin and a bit flimsy, so comfort is marginally acceptable. I requested the full-face helmet design, which entailed routing the corresponding boom under the forward helmet lip and under the chin area during installation, but the boom and mic are robust and well-designed piece of this system. Just make sure you position the mic close to your lips and then dial in the VOX sensitivity settings via the Road Glide's on-screen menus.

Another potential problem is the simple PS2-type connector Harley decided to use on the plug into the helmet, which may not be appropriate in extreme environments and probably too fragile for a helmet that’s being pulled off and put on constantly. The quick-release cord connection failed several times along my 2,000-mile trip, with the sound sometimes cutting out during head checks in dense traffic (but then, should you really be listening to anything through your headset in dense traffic?)

The sound quality is pretty good, especially for communications. Voices in the speakers came through fairly crisp and clear, with very little distortion. The sound quality for tunes is less impressive because the headset speakers don't feel well-matched to the output of the Road Glide’s Harmon Kardon sound system, and quality degrades at the higher volumes you’ll use at highway speeds. That said, they’re still an improvement over listening to tunes over the bike's speakers, which offer better sound quality at a standstill, but not when you're doing 75. There are better aftermarket speakers out there, but clearly H-D addresses the communications part of the equation with this BOOM! unit, and in that sense, it’s more than up to the task.

To make things easier to navigate (or so I thought) I also scored a pair of H-D Men's Skull Touchscreen Tech gloves (harley-davidson.com; $55). The combination goatskin leather and mesh mitts offered a much better fit and feel than my clunky lined FLY driver gloves. The Touchscreens claim to have a touchscreen-compatible index finger and thumb, but they really didn’t do much for enhancing phone operation when I wore them, though they did look pretty cool and offered up plenty of airflow on hot days in the saddle. They worked fine on the Harley's BOOM! 6.5 GT screen, but then that unit is in fact designed to work with any glove.

Beyond these issues, the Road Glide took me from Portland to Sturgis and back without fuss, in excellent comfort, still returning 40 mpg on average. And every piece of pockmarked pavement made me that much happier I’d upgraded the shocks recently. More on that trip in the next installment.