Slashdot Mirror
Remove iPod European Volume Cap
bsodmike writes "This is a complete how-to for removing the EU Cap in the new iPods allowing 104dB bliss! Thanks to everyone @ #eucap including UnixMonkey, Keaner, Silvacow, m@rk et al." Some countries have an upper limit of 100dB for consumer devices, so the European version of the iPod is "crippled."
An increase of 3dB is equivalent to doubling the power output. 4dB is quite significant.
It's not just European units. It seems to be all iPods outside of the United States.
I know that personally, my first generation 10GB model iPod was volume dropped, and I'm in Australia.
This has nothing to do with DRM, the DCMA, or whatever the hell you think you're talking about. Not everything defined limit on technology in the world is.
e n/ artikel.asp?lngCategoryId=1312&lngArticleId=26 33
In fact, this is legislation that defines appropriate maximum volumes for noise-emitting consumer devices in public or workplace areas in different countries in the EU.
http://www.econsumer.konsumentverket.se/mallar/
It's a little different than being told by some protecting-its-assets company what you can and can't do with the product you bought (like Microsoft stepping on Xbox modding, and using the widely abused DMCA to do it). If you use a stereo in public in some EU countries, and you crank it up over 100dB, you are breaking the law. They don't really care about your possessions and what you want to do with it, and they have no reason to.
I LOVE this, actually, and wish they'd implement it where I live (Virginia). I'm trying to watch a movie in my house, for example, with my girlfriend, and we want to sit and enjoy the movie. We DON'T want some asshat sitting at the stop light with his BIG FAT SPEAKERS going insane and making our drinks ripple from a hundred feet away.
Do a little reading next time, please.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Otherwise known as circumaural headphones, and not even all of those will help you. You need to seek out closed headphones, which are usually either circumaural or intra-aural (earbuds). If you're in a quiet environment, closed circumaurals don't sound as nice as open circumaurals, because in closed ones the sound is vibrating around in whatever material is keeping the sound out/in, but in some cases they're necessary, such as loud rooms or rooms with other people. Just don't think that because you're buying a big pair of headphones that completely engulfs your ear that you're going to have isolation from the outside world or that the world won't be able to hear what you're listening to.
Not really, 4 orders of magnitude is increasing it a thousand times (10^4).
"bels" are factors of 10, whic most people mean when they speak of orders of magnitude. decibels are one-tenth of a bel, hence the prefix. 4 dB is 4/10 of a factor of 10, or something like a factor of 2.5.
1 dB is is a factor of 1.26, i.e. a 25% increase.
Further complicating the situation is that most people don't listen to their music with an acoustic power meter. Psychoacoustically, there is a non-linear relationship between perceived loudness and acoustic power. The commonly quoted "10 dB is twice as loud" is not an exact relationship, but is rather close at low sound levels.
...than your hearing! We're all used to thinking of ourselves as immortal, especially when we are young. When I was a teenager I used to listen to a Sony walkman fully crankin'. Now I have well over a decade of suffeing with tinnitus. Anything over 90db is damaging to the ear. One hearing specialist said that listening to headphones is akin to jamming a pair of firehoses into both ears and turning the water on full blast in terms of the damage it'll do to your hearing. It may sound like hyperbole, but it probably isn't that far from the truth!
Tinnitus can cause depression, sleeplessness and a host of other psychic and physical maladies. From a personal perspective, if you hear a loud noise that annoys the hell out of you you have two choices. 1)Walk out of the room where you hear the offending noise 2) Turn the sound down! If you have tinnitus, you can't do either of those things. You just have to live with it. There is no cure and by the time you realize that the ringing in your ears isn't going away that's about it. You will hear that sound for the rest of your life! Unless, of course nanomedicine can provide a cure, but don't hold your breath or hang your hopes on that one!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Err, not tried a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SL earbuds then?
104 dB is (10^0.4) = 2.51188643150958 times louder than 100 dB.
2B = 10 times louder than 1B
2dB = 10^0.1 times louder than 1dB
got it?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It's not your eardrums that are damaged, but the cilia in your cochlea. These are fine hairs that are vibrated as sound waves travel past them, and stimulate the nerves to which they are attached.
These hairs do not recover from damage. Once the hair is killed, you have lost the ability to hear the frequency that hair was "tuned" for.
You will experience permanent, irreversible hearing damage at 104dB within five minutes.
Decibel Exposure Time Guidelines
Accepted standards for recommended permissible exposure time for continuous time weighted average noise, according to NIOSH and CDC, 2002. For every 3 dBs over 85dB, the permissible exposure time before possible damage can occur is cut in half.
Continuous dB Permissible Exposure Time
85 db 8 hours
88 dB 4 hours
91 db 2 hours
94 db 1 hour
97 db 30 minutes
100 db 15 minutes
103 db 7.5 minutes
106 dB 3.75 min (< 4min)
109 dB 1.875 min (< 2min)
112 dB .9375 min (about 1 min)
115 dB .46875 min (about 30 sec)
Don't fuck with loud sounds. It's just not worth it.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
IIRC, Apple did this because France complained about the 104dB Max volume. iPod sale was banned in France for a short while over this. Blame the French ! :)
You set your player to volume X. At that volume a soft note is barely audible, where as a loud note is somewhat audible. You turn the volume to 104db. The loud note causes bleeding. The soft note is now quite audible.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Not in acoustic dB. In acoustic dB (at least as used in my college physics classes), an increase of 10dB is 10 times the power whereas with REAL dBs, an increase of 10 dB is 10.079... times the power. I know that the two were different in my class because I used real dBs and got bunches of questions on the computer-graded homework wrong. Stuff like "An increase of 30 dB is an increase of how many times in power?" I answered 1024 (2^(30/3)) because that's the answer that it would have been if that had been antenna gain, but the answer that the computer wanted was 1000 (10^(30/10)). Because we didn't get feedback as we answered questions, I got almost every single one of those problems wrong.
You just made my point for me. Yeesh why'd it take so long.
When you turn up the volume to "YES I CAN MAKE A 104db sound" level, the soft notes will not be 104db. Therefore that will not damage your ears.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This assumes, of course, that they're talking about 100+ dB of sound pressure (SPL).
But that's completely ludicrous. The SPL levels are a function of the speaker/headphone design and proximity to your ears in addition to the power output of the amplifier.
A dB is a unit of ratio between a given level (power, pressure, whatever) and a reference level.
In this particular case, they're probably talking about dBu or dBV or dBm or some other ratio involving output voltage/power levels.
104dBu is not the same as 104dBV which is not the same as 104dBm. Either one can translate into high SPL levels, low SPL levels, or anything in between, depending on what kind of speakers, headphones or other amplifiers are attached.
According to Apple the iPod can put out up to 30mw of RMS power per channel. This is about 29 dBm (20 log(30) ),so it's obviously not what the original article is talking about.
I'm actually rather curious now to know what that unqualified "104 dB" figure is referring to, since every different brand/model of headphones you use will have a different SPL for any given power level.
IF you did that, then the poorest would actually get health care for a change!
I think you'll find that, in the UK at least, everyone gets healthcare, rich or poor. It's in places like the US with a walletectomy approach to healthcare that the poor lose out.