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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.'"
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.
...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.