Some Children's Headphones Raise Concerns of Hearing Loss, Report Says (go.com) 77
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.
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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?
Re:cheap chinese crap (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Pain: 120db. Damage: 85db (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
Re: Pain: 120db. Damage: 85db (Score:2, Funny)
What? What?
Confused about logarithmic? (Score:2)
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.
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You just got wooshed. I'm surprised you didn't hear it.
Doh! (Score:3)
Yes, yes I did.
The m in dBm is milliwatts (Score:2)
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)".
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I wish I would have known this when I was younger and absolutely blasted music through tiny earbuds. "It doesn't hurt, so it must be OK".
Now I have absolutely no hearing above 16KHz, additional mid-high frequency loss in my left ear (barely able to hear things like hi-hats) and mild tinnitus. And let me tell you, it sucks major ass.
I wear good earplugs to all concerts now, and in general any time I expect to be exposed to even moderately loud sounds.
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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.
Re:cheap chinese crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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using headphones and playing outside are not mutually exclusive.
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It's much too dangerous to let kids play outside. They might be kidnapped by the police or child services "for their own good".
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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
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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 vi
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What? A lot of cheap headphones don't have good enough drivers to be loud enough to damage your hearing. I would want to buy headphones that I can hear DVDs with. Remember how DVDs would play at darned near a whisper even with the volume cranked up to full? Yeah you can't watch those with crappy headphones that don't have volume.
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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.
FUD (Score:1)
Wish they'd looked into this sooner (Score:4, Insightful)
I still listen to Megadeth though.
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Citation needed. Just curious why do you capitalize random words? Is this something all old people do?
Yes! Blame the lack of Sound control on the Headphones! Off my lawn!
:)
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generation as a whole choose to ignore the warning
I don't know about ignoring the warning. There was no ignorance. It was more like willfully disregarding the warning because listening to music quietly is simply not cool. Not cool at all.
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My fellow metal brother, I am with you. I was known in high school as the fat shy kid who wore the big (circumaural) headphones all the time. I was in my own world.
Now, after many earplug-free concerts and a lot more maximum volume listening, I too have some issues hearing people.
I also continue to listen to Megadeth... though my tastes have shifted more toward the prog metal (mostly European) genres.
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A lot of my friends still refuse to wear earplugs at concerts, even REALLY GODDAMN FUCKING LOUD DEATH METAL SHOWS.
I learned my lessen, and while my hearing is a bit damaged, I'm doing my best to not damage it any further.
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Word. That was exactly the song I was thinking of when I wrote the OP. I find it unusual that I can also hear very high frequencies that others can't.
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I listened to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Motorhead and pretty much anything loud. Including concerts. And I play electric guitar.
Yet I lie awake at night because a neighbor snores, or the aquarium fish flips its fin at the other side of the house, or the blood coursing through my veins, or the hum of a lamp, or even cats walking across the carpet in the room above mine.
If anything, listening to so much loud music has made me overly sensitive, and I have to sleep with ear plugs. Not that it helps when th
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Now in my adult life people get frustrated when I can't hear them.
Then get some hearing aids!
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Want to save your hearing? (Score:3)
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.
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Also get some ear plugs. A lot of music and dance venues play much louder than 85db for prolonged periods, I presume to get the bass up to the level where you can feel it. With a good pair of ear plugs, you can still feel the bass and hear the music, with much less stress on your hearing. Why would you want to sacrifice future concerts for one concert right now?
"A lot"? Try "all". I'd say, on average, you're hitting 105 dB SPL at a minimum in most venues and closer to 115 to 120 near the speakers.
Another reason to wear ear plugs - your brain does some acoustic processing to deal with high volume levels (there's some multi-band audio compression via threshold shifts... it's really quite fascinating) and that's fatiguing. That's why if you go to a loud concert or club, even if you're not drinking and even if it's relatively early, you're wiped out when it's over, m
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Have a look at Etymotic [etymotic.com] plugs. I've used ER20s (looks like they are called 'Ety Plugs', now) at clubs and events for years. They do what they say - drop the volume without distortion. I can have conversations while wearing them that would have been a muted mess with the more usual foam earplugs. They aren't bad for long stays in server rooms, either.
If you attend loud events with any regularity, and want to _keep_ being able to enjoy those events for years to come, protect your hearing.
Caveat - no associati
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Have a look at Etymotic [etymotic.com] plugs. I've used ER20s (looks like they are called 'Ety Plugs', now) at clubs and events for years. They do what they say - drop the volume without distortion. I can have conversations while wearing them that would have been a muted mess with the more usual foam earplugs. They aren't bad for long stays in server rooms, either.
If you attend loud events with any regularity, and want to _keep_ being able to enjoy those events for years to come, protect your hearing.
Caveat - no association with the company, just a satisfied customer.
I keep a pair of them in a small metal tube on my keychain, just in case a bar is too loud. :D
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Howard Leight Bilsom 303. I bought a huge box back when I rode motorcycles everyday (the wind noise around a helmet is a real ear-killer), and I'm still using them for concerts. They're the best earplugs I've ever used, foam, silicone, molded, wax, you name it.
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Yep you have three options to deal with room noise or just one if you have shitty headphones (or earbuds).
1. TURN UP THE VOLUME SO YOU CAN HEAR YOUR MUSIC OVER THE BUS NOISE. CHEAP.
2. Have good noise cancelling headphones then you can listen at a lower volume and still hear your music. Expensive & batteries or an extra device to charge.
3. Have good Isolating headphones then you can listen at a lower volume and still hear your music. Expensive.
Kids headphones are probably on the cheap end of the spectrum
Errh... (Score:3)
What?
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"CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?!"
Original full report here (Score:1)
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There is no such thing as 'too old' until you are dead.
So, would you fuck the Queen of England? Or is she too old?
The 80s just called (Score:2)
and want their news back.
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The 90s just called and want their "the *0s just called and want their * back" joke back.
Put a label, call it good (Score:1)
what might be useful (Score:2)
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
See EN50332 (Score:2)
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The problem is that devices have widely different output levels. Some mobile devices put out less than 1Vrms maximum, but headphone amps can output as high as 3Vrms. If you scale the headphone sensitivity to the mobile device, the headphone amp will play really goddamn loud, but if you scale them to the headphone amp, you will barely be able to hear anything from the mobile device.
What should ideally be brought to market, are headphones with limiters/compressors built in, so the maximum sound level delivere