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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."
I have very bad hearing, have done since I was a kid (even had surgery to correct it). I listen to music roughly 10-15% louder than most of my peers. In a noisy room louder still. If they limit volume on my MP3 player will I have to hack it in order to listen to it at a reasonable volume for me?
My music usually doesn't surprise me with sudden shifts of maximum volume. But every time a program switches to commercial on TV, the max volume is a shit load louder and with more commercials than ever before that means fiddling with the remote every other minute. It wasn't always this way and is way annoying.
It's a pity the EU doesn't apply noise limits to public transport. The Victoria Line of the London Underground regularly hits 100dB. Travel on it to work every day for five years and your hearing will be permanently fucked up by it. Like mine.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If they're really concerned about deafness, they'd ban companies like Apple from including those crappy ear buds that everybody seems to have to wear. The poor fit and low quality virtually assure that the volume gets bumped up way higher than it needs to be.
Personally, I like my shure e2c, sure they're expensive, but you don't need to spend a lot of money, just get a earbud that provides for a proper seal in the ear. I can have my volume turned down pretty much all the way on the bus, and I can still barely hear the noise from the rest of the bus.
While all our governments are in a nanny-state frame of mind, they might turn their attention more usefully to the kind of amplification given to bands in pubs and clubs, where the dimensions of the places are often small enough to hear the sound of a mouse fart from one side of the room to another, but the bands turn up the volume as high as they can anyway. Or at least in a mathematically inverse ratio to their musical ability.
It's common to see musicians playing with plugs stuck in their ears so they don't drive themselves stone deaf, while they obviously consider it perfectly OK for them to obliterate the hearing of customers frequenting the place.
I realise I'm probably a tedious old fart, but I've long been forced to recognise that my hearing is far from what it was when I was a teenager or even in my twenties, and I hold many of these crappy bands to blame.
The reason I mentioned the ban on headphones while driving or riding a bike was because of the aforementioned incident where someone was killed by a train because they didn't hear it is because it happened 5 minutes from where I live.
Banning (and then fining) stupidity works as a form of user education, because stupid people get caught, then bitch and moan to everyone about how it's so *unfair" - while everyone else goes "don't you think it's pretty stupid what you did?" It also gives parents a fallback, instead of just having to say "because I told you to!" for things like "wear your bicycle helmet" and "put on your seatbelt."
It's the same for drunken driving. Here it's a criminal offense and can get you up to 10 years in jail; we heavily advertise this fact during holiday periods, so people at parties feel they have more support when they demand that a drunk guest hand over their keys.
Laws against stupidity aren't there toi help the stupid - they're too stupid - they're there for the rest of us. A ban on "too loud headsets" will help reduce the second-hand noise everyone else hears while some idiot is blasting their brains out.