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.'"

Comments

This is the same every couple years...

[mobiux]

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.

Low volume, high fidelity

[InakaBoyJoe]

Headphones, speakers, and amplifiers operate best at certain volume settings, that's why people crank it up -- because the output sounds like crap at low volumes. Unfortunately, these things are specced in terms of things like "watts" and "signal to noise dB" -- all measures that favour high volumes. Even specs like frequency range don't talk about changes in frequency response as you adjust the volume.

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.