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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."
Why the fuck do people bother with that crap? Do they really think that they have cunningly found a legal loophole that every lawyer in the world has missed? Do they not realise that if they trotted out that defence in any court in the world the judge would just laugh at them?
Gah.
Seriously, who thought that people needed to be protected from a portable music player? How much money was spent in the House of Reps. and Senate debating, drafting, and approving this bill? If you want to make a device that plays 125dB through headphones, fine. If people want to listen to it at that level, fine. If a year from now, that person is deaf, too bad. Don't listen to music that loud, dumbass. Can't we just get to government to quit trying to protect us from ourselves?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Decibels are logarithmic. Thats 4 orders of maginitude.
Why not fork?
will be branded assholes.
Think you are being polite wearing earphones in a computer lab or library? Think no one can hear you? You are wrong!!!
Only those full-size aircraft-or-studio-style headsets can attenuate the sound enough for other people to be oblivious to the crap-rap within.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
It comes down to this. A little media player driven by a tiny amount of battery power can only put out so much sound and still have a sane battery life.
If someone actually wants quality sound, instead of just some junk to listen to while jogging, they're going to use a non-mobile system.
May we never see th
A friend of mine contracted tinnitus after going to an Orgy concert. From what I last heard, she's in the opening stages of dementia, because of the noise in her head. It's really, really sad. She's a great girl, too. :-\
Made me turn my headphones down, it did.
Informatus Technologicus
And I suppose that this means that the battery life on the European iPods is better than the American model then?
The only Good System is a Sound System
For what it's worth my hearing is just fine too.
Like I said, we all think we're immortal, especially when we're young. But we're all put together the same, pal. Physics are physics. I'm glad you're okay, and I'm sure you're banking that you'll always be okay. I used to bank on that too. Now all I can tell you is "don't bank on it"!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Depends on what you set the volume at. :)
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
Color me surprised that Slashdotters are jumping in to support the government mandating morality.
Nevermind that there's no way in hell an iPod can put out 104db, nor that many people use headphones that lower the volume due to the larger driver.
This is just like those people who want to make it illeagal to eat fatty food, smoke, have sex, or drive a sports car.
When did the idea that people should be able to run their own life beceme so radical?
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
They likely are talking about dB SPL. Remember, pressure is force divided by area, and pressure is scaler. The headphone speaker diaphragm puts out a force. When you hold the headphone out in the open air, that force is divided by an (effectively) infinite area, and the resulting SPL is very low.
But when you put that speaker diaphragm into your ear, the total interior area of your ear canal is very small. Divide the diaphragm force by the small ear canal area, and you have a large pressure. Voila! High SPL.
Have you ever seen an acoustic calibrator or pistonphone? This is exactly how those devices work. They usually output 94 dB or 114 dB SPL. If you listen to them in the open air, you barely hear the signal, but if you put them against your ear, you could blow an eardrum.
LISTEN TO THIS MAN! I just went to the Motorhead, Dio, and Iron Maiden concert last night, and still can not hear! Motorhead played so loud thatit hurt my ears. I got some earplugs for the Dio set, but took them out fo Maiden. Needless to say, I still can not hear. Hopefully by tommorrow I will be able too.
:) That didn't bring me back to "normal" hearing, though. What the Rx explained to me is that the ear has "natural defenses" agains loud noises and some parts of the inner ear swell up to prevent further damage. Pretty intellegent, really. But during that period where parts of the inner ear are "swollen" everything will sound quiter. After about a week, everything returned to "normal" and my hearing honestly seems completely fine. Except of course for the ringing in the ears, which never went away. I hope that your hearing returns to normal sans ringing! If you're still concerned about your hearing, a good souce for information is this place called "HEAR"or "Hearing And Education for Rockers". Some people may find them to be a bit preachy, but if you can get past that there is a lot you can learn about how not to fuck up your hearing. As the old saying goes, you don't know what you have till it's gone.
Thanks dude. I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with your hearing. I strongly believe that my tinnitus was caused in large part by wearing headphones. But what tipped the balance for me, as far as the persistent ringing in my ears is concerned, was seeing the Nine Inch Nails play at a tiny club in Neptune NJ (back in 1990). It was so loud it was like standing inside a jet engine. Directly afterward I couldn't hear properly for three days straight days to the point where during that time everything sounded as if it were under water. The loss in hearing, thank god was temporary, but the ringing in the ears has been there ever since. Another time, a few years later I was bombed out of my mind at a Bad Brains show, and due to fluctuations in the pit, I ended up pressed up against the speaker column! Though at that point I was a devout ear-plug user, and I were using 30db attenuation rated earplugs it wasn't nearly enough for the time I was pressed up against the speakers! From that point I had tinnitus *AND* pain for something on the order of 3 years afterward. Not fun, not really.
I have to say though that earplugs, while gerally a good idea, definitely interfere with your enjoyment of live music. The bottom ranges of the music become muddy, and the top ranges are almost always cut-out altogether. A good alternative to your garden variety drugstore earplugs are something known as "musician's earplugs" which attenuate all frequencies of the sound spectrum at roughly the same level.The only drawback to those is that they are fairly pricey (at approximately $200 a pop, last time I looked). So, if you lose them or they fall out of your at a show you're fucked! Other than that, even at the going rate I find them to be of exceptional value.
But what you are going through in terms of "deafness" is almost certainly temporary. It sounds like what happened to me after the NIN show. I went to the doctor because I was so freaked about the possibility of going deaf and a good old fashioned ear siphoning did a lot to restore the hearing I had "lost". Pretty amazing how much they can get out of there, I'm pretty sure I could have built an entire new human out of the refuse ejected from my ear!
As to this "bitcreep" fellow (or whatever the fuck his name is)...about all I can say is "yeesh! Some people!" He makes a lot of assumptions about my "assumptions" and what I know and what I don't know. And I was particularly entertained by his attempts to tell me what I'm saying. Thus spake bitdork:
Quod scripsi, scripsi.