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New Tech to Help Prevent Hearing Loss?
Wired is reporting that Blomberg is working on an invention to help users maintain a greater control over the volume output of portable music devices. Many people have expressed a growing concern about hearing loss in recent years due to the increased use of headphones and exposure to loud music. From the article: "Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, described hearing loss with a nice analogy: 'If you have a field of grass and you walk on it, you compress the grass and it bends down over the night, and in a few days, it springs back up and is OK again. But if you keep doing that over and over, you wear a path in it. And that's kind of what happens with hearing loss.'"
It's called a volume control - sometimes in the form of a knob, sometime a button.. This is going to revolutionize the industry!
Starsucks
Um, OK... let's now apply your half-assed knowledge:
a) modern pop music already massively overcompressed due to the studio trend of squeezing something into every frequency range (there is very little dynamic range in modern music)
b) the problem is due to compensating for high ambient dB by increasing the player's volume
b) compressing 120 dB of your favorite pop music is still 120 dB of volume because if you compress it so that there are no "dangerous" peaks, you have a DC signal. duuuhhhhh.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Most people who listen to loud music do so with full knowledge that listening to music so loud might be bad for their hearing. And they choose to do so anyway. Some sort of device or software that "makes users aware of unsafe volumes" will not do much to stop them from listening at that volume. It's not like most people don't already know. The EU already tried to force iPods to limit their volumes, and European consumers went out of their way to circumvent those restrictions. What's this new invention going to do to try to stop me?
For the most part, the reason people crank their music up so loud is to drown out ambient noise. Standard buds are *horrible* for sound isolation. Not only do they allow plenty of ambient noise in, but they waste energy leaking sound out, which also has the effect of annoying the people around you.
The solution? Either get a good set of cans, or buy canalphones. Personally, I picked up a set of Shure E2C's. Expensive? Yes. But the sound isolation is *amazing*. I can drive these phones at easily half the power of my old buds and still be able to hear my music perfectly while dropping ambient noise at least 10-15 db. As an added side effect, they have excellent sound quality, particularly at their price point. They're worth every penny, IMHO. And for things like long road trips or flights, they're a life saver.
People that listen to anything remotely acoustic hate compressors. Compressors are great for normalizing a recording so that it's more uniformly loud on playback ("ready-for-radio"), but they suck for maintaining fidelity. It doesn't matter quite as much with britney spears (or whatever the neo-grunge band of the day is) as it does with something more dynamic (songs with strong vocals and light accompaniment, acoustic instrumentals, etc), because the overall level of the song doesn't change much, and you don't notice losing detail.
Just my $0.02
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
First of all, there's a big difference betweem audio output power and Sound Pressure Level.
IIRC, the iPod has a max output of 120dB SPL using the standard headphones. That's the equivalent of being near a riveter, a jackhammer or putting your ear next to the grille of a car with a very loud horn. Should they be allowed to generate SPLs of 140dB (jet engine at take off power at 75 or so feet). Or 150db? How about so loud that it makes your cranial fluid seep out your ears?
Just because you can hurt yourself with a product doesn't mean the product shouldn't exist.
That's not what I said. What I said was, if the mfg has a means of preventing you from hurting yourself while using the product and the mfg fails to take those steps, the mfg opens itself up for class action lawsuits.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm saying that's what happens in today's world.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...is that different headphones have different volumes at the same power output. One of the really cool things about the high output of the iPod is that you can hook up higher quality headphones to them and it's still powerful enough to drive them. For example, my BeyerDynamic 250-80's have 80 ohms of resistance vs. the about 40ohms for the standard iPod earbuds. I have to turn the "volume" up higher on my iPod to reach the same volume with my headphones compared to the earbuds, but it's still able to drive them, which is really cool. If you read head-fi.com, you'll find that some people actually buy portable headphone amps so they can drive their high-resistance headphones. I think it would be really cool if my iPod could tell me the decibel level that I'm playing my headphones at. But you'd need some sort of extra interface between the headphones and the player, and possibly some sort of microphone in the headphones, to be able to do that.