Is it time to replace your race suit? Let’s get you track-ready. Will A Sparco Helmet Kit Work With A Terratrip Intercom?
The question arrives in some form every few weeks. There is a Terratrip amplifier in the car, it has been faultless for years, and nobody wants to bin it. The helmets are Sparco. The wiring inside them has done ten seasons of mud and scrutineering bays, the earpieces crackle, and it is time for fresh kits. So, will new Sparco helmet kits work with the old Terratrip?
Short version: yes. There is one thing to check before you order, and it is on the amplifier, not the helmets. This page covers the check, the kits that fit, and the one cheap lead that sorts the awkward case.
The short answer
Sparco wire their helmet kits to the standard Peltor established, terminating in a male Nexus jack. Terratrip amplifiers split into two camps on that standard.
If your amplifier is a Terratrip Professional Plus+, either generation, a current Sparco helmet kit plugs straight in. The Plus+ range was built Peltor compatible at the factory, so the female Nexus socket on the amp accepts the male Nexus plug on the Sparco kit and the wiring behind the pins matches. Fit the kits, plug in, done.
If your amplifier is a Clubman or a Professional, including the Professional V2, the socket carries Terratrip’s own wiring, designed around their own headsets. A Sparco kit will physically connect and then behave badly. Terratrip make a Peltor headset adaptor for exactly this situation. One lead per seat converts the socket to accept any Peltor standard kit, Sparco included. Two adaptor leads and the same kits work fine.
One plug, two wirings
Nearly every rally intercom ends in the same Nexus jack. The plug tells you nothing. The wiring behind it decides whether two brands talk to each other.
Sparco is Peltor standard
Sparco helmet kits use the wiring standard Peltor set, the same family as Bell, ZeroNoise and OMP. Male Nexus plug on the kit, female socket on the amp.
The amp decides
Terratrip Professional Plus+: kits plug straight in. Clubman and Professional: add Terratrip’s Peltor adaptor lead, one per seat.
If the label has worn off the amplifier, look at the headsets it came with. Terratrip’s own headsets and helmet kits belong to the Clubman and Professional generation, so if that is what you are unplugging, assume you need the adaptor leads.
Still not sure? Email us a photo of the unit and its sockets and we will identify it before you spend anything.
Why the brand on the helmet barely matters
A rally intercom is three parts: an amplifier somewhere in the cockpit, and a kit in each helmet made up of two speakers and a noise cancelling microphone. The amplifier powers the microphones and pushes speech to the other seat. Every brand sells the same three parts, and nearly every brand terminates the helmet lead in the same connector, a small locking jack called a Nexus.
That connector is where people get caught. Because the plug is physically identical across brands, everything looks compatible on the workbench. Behind the pins there are two wiring camps. The big one is the Peltor standard, set by the Peltor headsets that dominated rallying for decades. Sparco, Bell, ZeroNoise and OMP all wire to it, which is why kits from those brands interchange happily. The smaller camp is the holdouts running their own wiring: Terratrip’s Clubman and Professional amplifiers, and Stilo’s Trophy and WRC systems, which do their own thing entirely.
Plug a kit from one camp into an amplifier from the other and you get silence, or one working earpiece, or a microphone that transmits a whisper under a hairdryer of noise. Nothing gets damaged. It is simply the wrong conversation happening across the right plug.
Working out which camp a given amplifier sits in is most of the job when these questions come in. I am Cameron, I handle fitment and compatibility here at GSM, and the rest of this page runs in the order I would check it for you.
Which Terratrip you have decides everything
Terratrip’s intercom range has run for decades under the Terraphone name, and the model on the sticker settles the whole question. The Clubman is the entry unit, two volume controls, powered off the car battery. The Professional sits above it, and both of these use Terratrip’s own headset wiring. The Professional Plus+, the top model with automatic volume control, is the one that moved to the Peltor standard.
So the check is one glance at the label. Plus+ anywhere on the unit means Sparco kits go straight in. Clubman or Professional with no Plus means you order Terratrip’s Peltor headset adaptor at the same time as the kits, one per seat. They are listed on Terratrip’s own site and cost far less than replacing an amplifier that still works.
Sparco helmet kits against the Terratrip range
The Sparco kits
For open face helmets, which is most rally crews, the kit to have is the Sparco open face intercom headset kit. Speakers in noise attenuating ear cups, a flexible boom microphone you can set exactly where you want it, and the male Nexus plug on the end of the lead. It is built for Sparco’s RJ family but it retrofits into most open face lids without drama.
For full face helmets Sparco sell the parts separately. The full face microphone mounts in the chin bar and carries a female Nexus socket of its own, which takes the ear plug speaker kit, micro speakers built into noise reducing ear plugs. It is a tidy system and the isolation is genuinely good in a loud car, though the two parts together cost more than a one piece kit.
If your helmets are the i versions of Sparco’s rally range, the RJ-i family, the intercom is already fitted at the factory and wired the same way, so everything on this page applies to those too. The full range lives in our intercom accessories section.
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The ZeroNoise route for full face helmets
Sparco are not the only kits in the Peltor camp. ZeroNoise, developed alongside Bell Helmets, wire to the same standard with the same male Nexus plug, and their standard kits cost a third of the Sparco money. The open face kit has the boom microphone, the full face kit puts the microphone in the chin bar, and both tuck behind the helmet lining with the earpieces sitting in the ear recesses.
They also make both kits with integral ear cups, which is the version I point people at for open face helmets with no padding around the ears at all. The cup does the noise reduction the helmet is not doing, and in a stripped car with a straight cut exhaust that matters more than the microphone does.
Everything in this section follows the same Terratrip rule as the Sparco kits. Plus+ amplifier, plug in. Clubman or Professional, adaptor lead first.
The adaptor drawer
Once you know the two camps exist, the adaptor wall stops being confusing. Gender changers join two connectors of the same wiring standard that present the same gender at each other, so a male to male or female to female Nexus lead sorts a kit and an amplifier that already match electrically. The extension lead solves a co-driver seat mounted further from the amp than the kit lead reaches.
The one to notice for this page is the Stilo Trophy conversion cable, which exists precisely because Terratrip’s older wiring is its own thing: it converts between a Stilo Trophy helmet and a Terratrip Clubman or Professional V2 amplifier. It is the same idea as the Peltor adaptor Terratrip make, just pointed at a different brand, and it is the clearest proof you will find that the amplifier’s wiring camp is what decides these questions.
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Browse the ranges this page comes from
Intercom accessories
Helmet kits, microphones, adaptor leads and wiring for every system we carry.
View intercom accessoriesHeadsets
Practice and recce headsets from Sparco, ZeroNoise and Stilo, male or female Nexus.
View headsetsZeroNoise intercom
Amplifiers, helmet kits and every Nexus adaptor lead in the ZeroNoise system.
View ZeroNoise intercomIf the amplifier is the part you would rather replace
Some crews take this moment to retire the old amplifier instead of adapting around it. There is a fair argument for it: every current amplifier we sell is Peltor standard, so the day it goes in, every kit on this page plugs straight in and the adaptor question disappears for good.
The ZeroNoise Brave is the value pick, an analogue unit with proper noise filtering that runs off a 9v battery or the car’s 12v feed. The Fury is the digital step up with adaptive noise cancelling and listening modes for different stages. The Bell Ultra sits at the top with three calibrated noise filters and Bluetooth, so the phone call to the service van on a road section happens in the helmets.
Road sections and recce
The same Nexus logic covers the headsets crews wear when the helmets are off. A practice headset is the same speakers and microphone in a padded headband, for recce and road sections, and gravel crews wear them all day. Sparco’s RT-Pro comes with a choice of male or female Nexus plug, and the ZeroNoise Professional does the same, which is the detail to check at order time: match the plug to the socket your amplifier presents, same as the helmet kits. The rest of the range is in our headsets section.
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What I would actually buy
Keeping a Professional Plus+: two Sparco open face kits if you want the ear cup comfort and the badge matching the helmets, or two ZeroNoise kits if you want the same wiring standard at a third of the price. Nothing else needed.
Running a Clubman or a Professional: order Terratrip’s Peltor adaptor leads with the kits and the old amp soldiers on. But price the whole basket first. Two adaptor leads is most of the way to a ZeroNoise Brave, and the Brave ends the wiring camp question permanently. If the old unit is staying in the car for sentimental reasons I understand completely, and the adaptors work.
Final thoughts
The customer question that started this page had a happy ending: Sparco helmet kits work with a Terratrip intercom, and the only variable is whether an adaptor lead sits between them. Check the amplifier label before you order and the rest follows.
If the label is gone, or the setup in the car does not match anything on this page, email us a photo of the amplifier and its sockets and we will identify the camp before you spend anything. Ask for me.
Cameron, GSM Performance