A Ducati rider once said that in her opinion, you either have a Shoei
head or an Arai head. The point is that there's no substitute for trying
on different helmets, and if possible, borrowing the helmets of friends
and going for a ride.

I do wear a Shoei X-sp most of the time - primarily for the eye
protection. I find that the X-sp gives the right amount of ventilation
behind the visor, without blowing annoying little jets of air into my
eyes (like my second RF-200 did). The X-sp is relatively quite and
streamlined, though I'm not sure it was worth the ~$450 I paid for it
(you can probably find it cheaper at this point). Friends of mine bought
Nolan flip-ups for half the money last summer, and they are very happy
with them, especially since they can easily wear eye-glasses underneath.

In my opinion, you need to be extremely cautious about anything written
in motorcycle magazines. After buying several things based on their
product recommendations, I found that about half of what I read just
didn't work for me in my own circumstances, and maybe 10 percent was
just flat out wrong. If you've got an Arari head, and the reviewer has a
Shoei head....

I thought the most deceptive publication of all was Motorcycle Consumer
News. They claim their newsletter is unbais because they don't accept
adds, and they do write in a convincing way. They also have a long
history of ripping their own subscribers in their letters column, which
makes me wonder how unbais they could possibly be toward venders to
don't rub them the right way. The only moto-publication I still
subscribe to is the AMA magazine. I don't like some of the things I read
in there either, but at least part of the money goes to lobbying for
motorcyclist rights.

Hopefully, no one will be put off by my magazine observations - Happy
Holidays and all that. And good luck to the original poster on selecting
the right helmet.

Randy Bone
'91 XLH1200