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Study Links Personal Music Players To Hearing Loss
fprintf writes "A recent NY Times article discusses links between personal music players and hearing loss. This is not anything new; personally, I have hearing loss from listening to my Sony Walkman cassette player many years ago. However, given the widespread use of the personal music players, I see people using earbuds everywhere; is there a technical solution to the potential danger?"
>>is there a technical solution to the potential danger?"
I used my mp3 player on a couple of flights. When I into a quiet hotel room and used it again i was shocked at the volume level i had used on the flight. If you are on a plane (train or buss as well), you tend to play it loud to drown out the bakground noise.
As I fly quite a bit, i bought a pair of noise reduction headphones. I went for a $75 pair at first, as I could not see the point of spending $300 on the Bose headphones. The $75 pair were pretty rublish, not much effect at all, so I splashed out another $300 on a pair of Bose noise reduction phones. They may be expensive, but they are worth the money as you can use a much lower volume setting and still hear everything very clearly.
I really recommend them as a way to protect your ears if you travel by plane, train or bus a lot. The luxary of having a cocoon of tranquility on the flight is also very nice to have.
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part of the problem is the use of dynamic range compression. not all music CDs or mp3s have the same dynamic range, so with most rock/pop/hip-hop/etc. the volume only varies between loud and very loud. but with classical or other genres where dynamic range is preserved, you'll have huge variances in volume. this means if you limit the media player volume to suit rock music, then when consumers listen to classical they'll have a hard time hearing the low to medium volume parts of the track. you could implement a feature to automatically normalize all the tracks played (i think the iPod already has this), but i don't know if this will cause a loss of dynamic range and thus negatively affect sound quality.
personally, i don't think PMP makers should artificially limit the speaker output to prevent hearing loss. some people have more sensitive ears than others, and some need the volume to be a little higher, whether due to the music they listen to or their hearing ability. i think a better idea would be to monitor the speaker output and display a warning to the user if the audio level is high enough to cause damage. this will give users the freedom to use their players as they wish while promoting safe listening habits.
I got myself a pair of these headphones: http://www.trustedreviews.com/multimedia/review/2006/03/20/Acoustic-Authority-iRhythms-A-9900-Sound-Cancelling-Headphones/p1 - Acoustic Authority iRhythms which are noise cancelling. Pair it with my Samsung T10 and you have cost effective quality audio with sub 60khz bass to knock your socks off (if you like).
I reckon people turn up their earbuds so they can hear bass or treble but really anything out of an earbud is going to be tinny - especially if it's coming out of an ipod. I'm pretty sure if they got themselves a decent pair of equipment like those they wouldn't feel like compensating for anything with volume.
Put down the music and run without it.
Your real objection is that you can't be alone with yourself for an extended time. You need something to drown that out.
t
Being a graduate audio systems engineer, one thing that springs to mind is to make speaker drivers in headphones less resonant between 3-5khz. It seems all I hear on bus/tube journeys from people listening to music is the hissing zingy twang of cymbals and guitar distortion.
The fact that this range is around the resonant frequency of the human ear canal means that this (already quite prominent) range of frequencies is amplified further by your body.
If earphones were more linear in their response perhaps people wouldn't damage their hearing as much - or turn up the volume.
The atmosphere and objects in the environment naturally dampen high frequencies. So, if you are listening to a set of stereo speakers 15 feet away, the high frequencies are significantly reduced compared to if you put your ear right next to it. Likewise, putting an earbud in your ear means that there is NO roll-off (dampening) of high frequencies. As a result, your ear is getting a huge dose of high frequency noise. Proper modeling of this and filtering of high frequencies would go a long way to curbing hearing loss. Don't count on people turning down the treble on their own. We've grown accustomed to it, and really the hardware should do it for us.
I was a bit late going to my first proper rock concert, I was 18. I stood right at the front, and it was brilliant. Then I listened to the album using headphones when I got home -- but at full volume, because my hearing was still suffering from the concert and I wanted loud. Big mistake -- the next morning I couldn't hear anything. I've never been so scared as when I woke up at 5am because my ears hurt and I couldn't hear anything.
Thankfully my hearing returned in one ear the next day, and in the other the day after.
I think the headphones were to blame, but I bought some earplugs for about £15 from eBay and I've used them at every concert I've been to since then. They don't distort the music, and it's still fun, and I don't feel like my ears are full of fluff when I leave.
I don't use headphones after going to a club/gig either.
Don't lose the music! (excellent advice)
Two words: Loudness War.
Get rid of that and you'll not only get better sound, you don't need to crank it up to 11 either.
actually, you could not possibly be any more wrong here.
one of the biggest reasons FOR the loudness war is noisy listening environments.
when you have very dynamic music being played, the quieter sections are often lost in the background noise, and all you can hear are the peaks. I have some old CD's with good dynamic range, and they are completely unlistenable on buses and subways because i can't hear anything except for the occasional symbol crash.
music that has been over-compressed is loud all the time, so i CAN hear everything, even the quiet sections, over the background noise.
i am not endorsing the loudness war here, i enjoy music with a wide dynamic range-when i have ideal listen conditions. When I'm on the go, compressed music works better.
Ideally, band would make 2 releases, a CD with full, rich, beautiful dynamic range, and a free mp3 release that's compressed for optimal listening in noisy environments.
-I only code in BASIC.-
no it can't sorry. read a book. the problem is physical damage to your ear drums called shearing... your ear drums arent a muscle like your lungs. its a nerve.
sorta like if you break your neck and spine they dont grow back, or if you get a scar ...
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
No, your ear drums are not a nerve. They're a tympanic membrane. Where you lose your hearing is from the loss and the degradation of the three inner ear bones caused by intense sound pressure that the tympanic membrane transmits, either as a result of standing next to loud speakers or having a set of earbuds crammed almost up against your ear drum.
This will also affect your balance, as the cilia in your cochlea break from this, and so do the tiny sodium/calcium deposits in your cochlea that act as balance weights.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.