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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.'"
I remember hearing about this when portable cassette players and cd players first came out.
Much more hearing loss that ever before recorded because of headphones.
Last time I checked, the only thing that is different since the 70's is the size of the headphone.
Kids still wear them too much, and listen to them too loud and unfortunately some still will have hearing loss.
It's not a "new" technology that is causing the problem, iPods didn't invent loud music.
It's kids not knowing about the volume control until it's too late.
The iPod already has a compressor, it's called Sound Check. However, a compressor doesn't make things quieter, it just reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds in a music track.
If a particular track has a very wide dynamic range, than a compressor can be useful because you don't have to turn up the volume to hear the quiet parts (and blowing away your eardrums when the loud parts kick in), but as noted by another poster, most music today is so heavily compressed than adding more compression won't help much.
It's going to be a dupe comment but here goes.
If I want to have any chance of actually *hearing* the music in an urban setting, I need to crank the volume up to max. The environmental noise of busses, people chatting on their cell phones, (heck, even an office environment,) means that I need to have that music set at max-1 or max (depending on the track) to have any chance of actually hearing it.
I had the pleasant surprise of being in a park this weekend and found that 60% volume was more than adequate to actually hear the music. But finally being in a park and not having all that incessant background noise, I didn't feel the need to listen to music that much.
I should really just shell out the cash and get a good set of earplug/earbud combo headphones that block external noise. Do these things really work at 50% volume?
I suggest you read Slashdot
It drives me crazy - I call someone who mumbles, so I turn up the volume all the way on my phone, straining to hear them... Then they start yelling to a co-worker, or kids, whatever. Or they push touch-tones.
My wife says my ears are just too sensitive - but that sort of rapid volume change, especially on tinny little speakers like most telephones - it hurts.
I want a limiter I can plug inline using normal sub-mini jacks for my cell phone that will set an absolute top limit for volume, while allowing me to turn up the soft sounds.
Just try searching for audio equipment that produces high-quality sound at relatively low volumes. Good luck! Not even us Slashdotters could find any measure, or review based on such criteria, let alone your average Joe walking into a consumer electronics store where he's encouraged to buy the 300 watt sound system because it's better than the 150 watt one.
Change needs to happen at the manufacturer spec level, and also the audio review level, to take into account the fact that some of us still want clear music without blowing out our ears.