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EU Recommends Noise Limits On MP3 Players
A story at the BBC notes increasing pressure from the European Commission to set standards that would limit the maximum volume on portable MP3 players. Their reasoning is that it would protect users from damaging their hearing after listening to loud music for extended periods. Quoting:
"This follows a report last year warning that up to 10m people in the EU face permanent hearing loss from listening to loud music for prolonged periods. EU experts want the default maximum setting to be 85 decibels, according to BBC One's Politics Show. Users would be able to override this setting to reach a top limit of 100 decibels. ... Some personal players examined in testing facilities have been found to reach 120 decibels, the equivalent of a jet taking off, and no safety default level currently applies, although manufacturers are obliged to print information about risks in the instruction manuals. Modern personal players are seen as more dangerous than stationary players or old-fashioned cassette or disk players because they can store hours of music and are often listened to while in traffic with the volume very high to drown out outside noise."
A technical problem requires a technical solution.
Instead of forcing media player manufacturers to implement a volume limiter, just force them to include a jamming frequency and allow third parties to sell jammers. When a person feels that someone's music is intruding on their personal space (in a bus, on a train, or anywhere that people are in close contact), a single button press could send a piercing squeal right through whatever audio the earbud guy had playing.
This has two benefits. First, if there are multiple people around and it is difficult to determine who is listening loudly, this gets all of them in one shot. Second, if a person's earbuds are so loud that the sound is invading someone else's personal space, the brief tone should be enough to put their eardrums out permanently.
Did the EU say members of parliament have big noses?
I must have heard wrong, you'll have to speak up -- I've been getting a bit deaf lately.
EU regs on the maximum roughness of toilet paper?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Not to mention the exceptional sound quality, even for the cheapo ones. I've actually listened to them side by side with recording studio speakers, and the sound quality is amazingly close, IMHO.
that sounds strangely like spam I've seen
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
> While all our governments are in a nanny-state frame of mind... ... ...[the bands] obviously consider it perfectly OK for them to obliterate
>
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> the hearing of customers frequenting the place.
Customers who were abducted from the streets outside, dragged into the club, and chained down so that they couldn't escape.
> ... ...I hold many of these crappy bands to blame.
>
Because you couldn't possibly be responsible for your own behavior.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
By that logic, this regulation of mp3 player volume level shouldn't exist either because the owners of the players should be responsible for their own actions and turn down the volume. I'm not saying I support that decision, I'm just saying it is a good point that if you're going to regulate headphone volume level, then you might as well also regulate volume level of bands.
I trust my Ogg player will be exempt from this :)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife