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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?"
s there a technical solution to the potential danger ?
Yes - very technical. Turn down the volume.
What?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
But it also threatens permanent hearing loss for as many as 10 million Europeans who use them, according to a scientific study for the European Union that will be published Monday.
I don't know if this is the report but the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) released a report on this in June [PDF Warning!]. It's not as long as it looks, about a quarter of the pages are citations to other studies. It looks quite comprehensive. It's important to note that this is not a simple thing to study. The report points out several times that your age and daily exposure and anatomical structure all play an important role in what you can tolerate before experiencing hearing loss.
The abstract from that report:
Exposure to excessive noise is a major cause of hearing disorders worldwide. It is attributed to occupational noise. Besides noise at workplaces, which may contribute to 16% of the disabling hearing loss in adults, loud sounds at leisure times may reach excessive levels for instance in discos and personal music players (PMPs). It is estimated that over two decades the numbers of young people with social noise exposure has tripled (to around 19%) since the early 1980s, whilst occupational noise had decreased. The increase in unit sales of portable audio devices including MP3 has been phenomenal in the EU over the last four years. Estimated units sales ranged between 184-246 million for all portable audio devices and between 124-165 million for MP3 players.
Noise-induced hearing loss is the product of sound level by duration of exposure. In order to counteract noise-induced hearing loss more effectively, a European directive "Noise at Work Regulations" taking effect starting February 2006, established the minimal security level at the equivalent noise exposure limit to 80 dB(A) for an 8 hour working day (or 40 hour working week), assuming that below this level the risk to hearing is negligible. The 8-hour equivalent level (Lequ,8h) is a widely used measure for the risk of hearing damage in industry, and can equally be applied to leisure noise exposures. The free-field equivalent sound pressure levels measured at maximum volume control setting of PMPs range around 80-115 dB(A) across different devices, and differences between different types of ear-phones may modify this level by up to 7-9 dB. The mean time of exposure ranges from below 1 hour to 14 hours a week.
Considering the daily (or weekly) time spent on listening to music through PMPs and typical volume control settings it has been estimated that the average, A-weighted, eight hour equivalent sound exposures levels (referred to "Noise at Work Regulations") from PMPs typically range from 75 to 85 dB(A). Such levels produce minimal risk of hearing impairment for the majority of PMP users. However, approximately 5% - 10% of the listeners are at high risk due to the levels patterns and duration of their listening preferences. The best estimate from the limited data we have available suggests that this maybe between 2.5 and 10m people in EU. Those are the individuals listening to music over 1 hour a day at high volume control setting.
Excessive noise can damage several cell types in the ear and lead to tinnitus, temporary or permanent hearing loss (deafness). Published data indicate that excessive acute exposures to PMPs music at maximal or near maximal output volume can produce temporary and reversible hearing impairment (tinnitus and slight deafness). Major discrepancies exist between the results of the studies on permanent noise-induced hearing loss in PMP users, with both, positive and negative studies published. Tinnitus and hearing fatigue may occur more frequently in teenagers chronically exposed to music, including PMP users, than in non-users.
In addition to auditory effects harmful, lasting and irreversible non-a
My work here is dung.
Some players have a dB-limit that can be activated. I remember that my old CD mp3 player did have this. It just did not allow the volume to be cranked up too high.
If it was hard to write it should be hard to read.
I've noticed, many times, that I start out with a fairly low volume (maybe 10% or so), and when a good song comes along, I turn it up a bit. However, by the end of the song, I don't really notice the higher volume anymore, and the next time I get a good song, I turn it up a bit more, until the player is at its maximum volume.
If I take the earphones out of my ears, put them back in an hour later, and turn on the player, I'll pull them out of my ears as fast as I can because the music is so horribly loud.
So the solution, I think, is having a "volume boost" button, which boosts the volume for the duration of the current track, and gradually decreases to the normal level during the next track, to avoid stacking up the boosts.
All headphones are noise canceling if you listen to them long enough at max volume.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Does bone conduction cause the same problem? If not, Vibe Body Sound Headphones may be an answer.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
How does that help? If you have hearing loss, the obvious solution is to turn UP the volume, so you can hear the music better, of course.
Seriously, this is a "Ric Romero" report to borrow a Fark term: High volumes for extended times cause hearing loss. News at 11. The only reason why portable players are any more significant in this than anything else is that since you can take them with you all the time, you have the opportunity to do the wrong ting more often.
There is no technical solution, because the maximum output of a player depends on the headphones plugged in to it. Plug in some low impedance IEMs with high efficiency, and you'll find that it may be able to produce SPLs in excess of 120dB no problem. Plug in some low efficiency high impedance professional phones, and you may find it struggles to do even 70dBSPL. Thus you can't set up some sort of magic limit that'll be ok for everything. A limit that would protect your ears with Shure IEMs would be damn near inaudible on Sennheiser 580s.
There are two things you can do to protect yourself:
1) Turn the volume down. Really, it is that simple. Just don't set the things so loud and it isn't a problem. That is ultimately what you have to do.
2) Get phones that isolate better. The reason why some people abuse the volume dial is to try and drown out noise. Don't do that. Block the noise instead. Instead of cheap earbuds, invest in some good IEMs. Yes, it is going to run you $100-300. Deal with it. If you can drop hundreds on a iPod, you can drop hundreds on good phones to go with it. Then take the time to get the right fit for your ears so they create a good seal. That will attenuate sound nearly as much as good earplugs.
With good earphones, you should be able to keep the volume down and still enjoy the music. You keep the volume down, there's no problem.
Loud noise, no matter what the source, is dangerous to your hearing especially over long periods of time. Playing loud music on speakers is just as bad as headphones. Only difference is you can do it all day on headphones and nobody will yell at you. Just turn that shit down to a reasonable level. If you can't because things are too noisy, get better headphones to block the noise.
>>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.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
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.
Make a player that you can only turn up to 9.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The real problem is to determine whether you are playing the music too loudly for your safety. Here is how to get a good idea of the harm you are doing ...
1. Find something like a watch or other device that makes a very quiet sound. Find a distance where you can just make out the sound.
2. Listen to your music source at your customary level for 15 to 30 minutes or longer if that is your habit.
3. Set up the conditions in (1) above and see if you can still hear the sound. If you can, you are probably not harming your hearing ... If not, then you have a temporary threshold shift and you have already done some small amount of damage to your hearing. The greater the shift, the greater the damage.
4. More likely, if you listen to loud music or listen in inherently noisy places, you will notice the threshold shift in daily life. background noises disappear, which is like 40-50dB SPL, and definitely a problem.
These hearing conservation links explain a lot Mp3 players are not the only culprit, driving with wind noise in your left (or your passenger's right) ear, circular saws and construction tools, and other sources of noise are damaging. Music is different in that it can not be blocked but can be controlled.
If you don't protect your hearing from loud sound, sooner or later a notch will start to form in your ear's frequency response curve. The notch will be centered around 4000 Hz, right where high frequencies get really high, and useful too. That notch widens above and below until it impacts 2KHz or even lower. Somewhere along the way, the detectors in the ear will get so damaged that they start detecting sound non-linearly and harmonic and intermodulation distortion arise. Finally, when they get injured some more, they start to fire "all or none" and even moderately loud sounds can be painful. That is called recruitment and is really damaging to hearing and sanity.
I hope this information is useful to readers. I hate to see people lose hearing when it is so unnecessary in most cases.
If you think your hearing is going bad, see an audiologist or ear doctor or both, soon. Most processes can be stopped, and believe me, you will be glad you at least stopped the damage.
I am pushing 60 years old, have used threshold shift changes to remind me to protect my hearing, and still have no noise notch in my good ear. My other ear was damaged by childhood infections and is mostly useless so I guess having only one ear made me more careful.
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.