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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.'"
Not a sound engineer, but a bassist. And I think I can provide the answer.
The solution we seek is what's known in the guitar world as a "compressor" or "limiter."
Fortunately, they are cheap and easy to build. What they do is put a ceiling on a range or ranges of frequency. I use it when I want punch in my high end but I don't want the thump in my low end to get out of control.
You can build the compressor to kick in and level anything (on all ranges) that exceeds the normal medically accepted maximum amplitude for human hearing.
The beautiful thing about compressors is that they stop you from producing obvious sounds you don't want but they don't simply reduce all sounds produced by your device.
What's so hard about this? And why in the hell are we calling this a "new tech?!" How about calling it "common sense?" If I ever designed a media player, this would be implemented regardless. The end user could look to find an amplifier if they want to blow their ears out, Apple has faced lawsuits and they will face even more as the millions who purchased their products use them and then deafly eye Jobs' deep pockets.
My work here is dung.
You know... I've always wanted a more complicated, over-engineered way of controlling the volume of my iPod. The volume control interface is just too damn easy to use.
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.
This just in, Wired is reporting that Bloomberg is working on an invention to help users talk over long distances without shouting and thus save the strain and inevitable hoarseness that comes with it:
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
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.
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.