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

Get Rich Quick Business Model

[eldavojohn]

I'm a bass player.

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.

1. Learn how to make a general sound compressor.
2. Hire a few electrical engineers and send them to order a few thousand PCB circuits.
3. Hire a mechanical engineer and have them make the encasings. Oh, most importantly, make sure the encasings are iPod white in color.
4. Your design should have a 1/8" audio jack in and a 1/8" audio jack out with a 3" length of audio cable. It's plugged into any media device and then your headphones plug into it.
5. Profit!

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.

Re:Get Rich Quick Business Model

[gclef]

A few things:

1) compressors have nothing to do with frequency. What they do is slow the growth of amplitude in a sound, after hitting a certain trigger level. They do this across the board for all frequencies: they're amplitude devices, not a frequency ones.

2) Setting up a compressor *right* is a skill, and is very dependent on the sound you're compressing. A poorly-configured compressor sounds like crap. You do not want to hear the compressor "breathing" (triggering & releasing hard & quickly)...it sounds like ass.

3) The compressor has no idea what sound level is actually coming out of the headphones. All it knows about is the electric signal passing through it. So, it would have to be set for specific headsets, as the different headsets are more/less efficient. This would be complicated & expensive.

4) Classical music folks *hate* compressors. You can hear the difference when you compress classical, and it sounds wrong. You really don't want to do this to classical if you can at all avoid it.

Let me be the first (or so) to say...

[rdurell]

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.