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Some Children's Headphones Raise Concerns of Hearing Loss, Report Says (go.com)
Some headphones marketed for children may not restrict enough noise for young ears. From a report on ABC: The Wirecutter, a technology products review website (owned by the New York Times), tried out 30 different children's headphones for style, fit and safety by using both a plastic model ear and a few real children. "There's no governing board that oversees this," Lauren Dragan, the Headphone Editor at The Wirecutter, told "Good Morning America" in an interview that aired today. Dragan added that the headphones for children all claim to limit volume to around 85 decibels. Sound below the 85 decibel mark for a maximum of eight hours is considered safe, according to the World Health Organization. The Wirecutter report found that some of these headphones emit sound higher than the 85 decibel mark. The full report here.
Exactly when and how young are people planting headphones on kids?
Are they talking younger than teenagers listening to music?
If so, WTF is a young child needing with earphones....aren't they out playing or something?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When I was a kid back in late 80's early 90's, I was constantly listening to Megadeth on my Walkman with the volume cranked up all the way. I paid the price for that. Now in my adult life people get frustrated when I can't hear them. I can easily trace the decline in my hearing back to my Walkman days. As near as I can tell, no one at the time thought it was serious matter at all.
I still listen to Megadeth though.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
aren't they out playing or something?
You're at least 20 years too late for that. Playing outside is too dangerous for our modern youngsters. Now we can just VR playing outside from the safety of our padded rooms.
I think there were only a handful of my late-teen/early-twenty years where I was in danger of playing my music beyond the pain threshold. Most people (even most kids) are smart enough for the "If it hurts, stop it," rule.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If so, WTF is a young child needing with earphones....aren't they out playing or something?
You didn't play outside in the park? Share some music with your friend in the sunshine, one earbud in each ear? You're being quite presumptuous for someone who sounds like their outside playing life was boring as crap without a decent soundtrack.
Buy some noise cancelling earphones. You can tell people over and over again about hearing loss but it won't matter if they can't hear that music over background noise of the noisy bus they are on.
Noise cancelling / closed cup earphones will just make you naturally turn down the volume.
Your old man bias is showing in half a dozen different ways here.
Kids as young as 3 are capable of wearing headphones effectively. No, it's probably not for music. And no, kids can't always be outside.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
What?
Exactly when and how young are people planting headphones on kids?
Most of these manufacturers have products targeted for kids as young as 2-3 years.
In my day parents had to listen to repetitive ear-worm songs from Barney, Raffi, etc. But now you can slap some headphones on the baby and avoid the horrible nightmare of children's music.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://thewirecutter.com/revie...
and want their news back.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
My 90 year old grandmother watches TV at full volume.
I find a lot of the music I have on my phone is barely audible at the volume limit that requires me to press a button to OK it in case I go deaf. My headphones have good sound quality but presumably are not very sensitive, but the volume of the original recordings clearly varies by over 20dB.
There is clearly no international standard for how many millivolts produces how many dB, and never will be, because it is a stupid idea. However, not as stupid as the report that led to this article. If you need a plan for how to cope with the stupid children of stupid parents this is NOT it! I am pretty sure that very few headphones are as loud as the London Underground trains, but children regularly travel by train.
Disclaimer: I have spent the last week measuring the noise in the server room.
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> I think there were only a handful of my late-teen/early-twenty years where I was in danger of playing my music beyond the pain threshold. Most people (even most kids) are smart enough for the "If it hurts, stop it," rule.
Hearing damage occurs from prolonged exposure to sounds over 85db. Pain starts at about 120db. So your hearing is damaged long before it's painful.
Decibels are a logarithmic scale, 120db (pain) is over 3,000 times as much power as 85db (damage). It takes 3,000X times as many watts to cause pain as it does to cause long term damage.
Every set of headphones should have a label... "Warning, if you are STUPID enough, to turn the volume to 11, do not come crying to us saying our headphones made you deaf. We do not reward STUPIDITY". Screw political correctness!
somebody needs to create a set of headphones (in both normal and "sport" versions) that
1 blocks outside noise (or filters it below danger levels))
2 includes a way for a Guardian/Other Caretaker to send sounds into the headset (even if its a Attn! Chirp)
3 compresses the dynamic range to cut the need to crank the volume
4 clips the top end of volume
It regulates maximum sensitivity of a passive headphone - and maximum SPL for a wireless headphone (or any headphone in wireless mode). It's only required in France right now - recommended in the rest of the EU, and ignored in the rest of the world. It also sets the max SPL at 100 dB.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Is the "logarithmic scale" part confusing?
An increase of 10db means it's ten times as much power. That's just the definition of decibel (deci meaning ten).
decibels - power
1 1
10 10
20 100
30 1000
40 10000
Starting with the sound level that causes hearing damage, 85db, ten times as much power would be 95db. If you add ten more d, that's 105db. That means you multiply the power by 10 again (for a total of 100X as much power). 115db is 1000 times as much power.
using headphones and playing outside are not mutually exclusive.
How loud it is in the headphones depends on the output of the amplifier
If you are sneaky, you could have a circuit that limits the voltage amplitude coming into the headphones. This could be stupid dumb (a diode limiter) or something more complex like an active gain control.
However I suspect most kid headphones are assuming the input maxes out at 2 VRMS, and use resistor dividers to reduce the voltage into the speakers. This dumb solution means that sometimes kids might not be able to hear overly quiet videos (such as on Kids Youtube) where audio loudness is not well managed.
The rule is "If it's too loud, you're too old.".
Bottom line is headphones are bad for your hearing. Children's headphones shouldn't even be a thing.
Yes, yes I did.
The "m" in dBm is milliwatts. So "dBm - power (in Watts)" is means "dB milliwatts in watts". Much like saying "MPH - speed (in feet per hour)".
It's much too dangerous to let kids play outside. They might be kidnapped by the police or child services "for their own good".
Headphones are perfectly fine, as long as you either get ones that isolate outside noise, or only listen in already quiet areas. Trying to block outside noise by turning up your music is what damages hearing.
Eat the rich.
There was a lawsuit against Apple for the original iPod for a similar reason. Steve Jobs was mostly deaf, so insisted that he be able to hear the sound, so the maximum volume was loud enough to be dangerous. Airline in-flight entertainment systems are the worst: they give you crappy headphones so that you have to turn the volume to max to hear anything if you use them, but if you buy a decent set of noise-cancelling ones then you want the volume down at around 20-40%. This is all fine, until they do an announcement, when they pause the movie and slam the volume up to 100% with no warning.
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You're confusing good and loud. Yes, cheap headphones can get loud enough to damage hearing, they may sound like shit when doing so, but that is a different matter.
this post is part of a FUD campaign?