Do iPods Damage Our Ears?

One of my personal pet peeves is standing next to people on the bus or subway (usually a teenager), and being treated to music blasting from their earphones. Sometimes it’s so loud that I can hear it clearly a few feet away. carrera sunglasses Maybe it marks me as an old person, but I always wonder how the listener can tolerate having the volume up so loud. Is the music loud because they can’t hear well? Or can they not hear well because the music’s so loud? It’s not a secret that loud noises can cause hearing loss. Noise-induced hearing loss, or NIHL, can be triggered by a one-time exposure to an extremely loud sound, or by repeated exposure to moderately loud ones. Being in close proximity to a gun shot (170 decibels) or a jet takeoff (140 dB) is enough to damage the delicate cells in our ears that turn sound waves into electrical impulses for the brain to process. (For comparison, a whisper is about 30 dB, and a normal conversation is about 60 dB.) Prolonged exposure to loud music at concerts or noise at work is also enough to cause damage, and once these cells are damaged, they never grow back, first affecting higher-frequency sounds, and then gradually working down towards the frequencies of normal speech. Hearing loss is a normal part of the aging process, but the increasing rate of hearing loss in children and young people has many health professionals concerned. The National Association of School Nurses reports that about 12.5 percent of kids aged six to nineteen have experienced some degree of hearing loss, and the American Academy of Family Physicians reports that up to a third of college students have high-frequency hearing loss. Don’t Stop the Music It’s easy to blame the now-ubiquitous iPod, but the increase in rates of hearing loss actually goes back far further. People have been listening to personal music players for a few decades, including the Walkman and portable radios, and many people in their 30s and 40s are also suffering from the beginning stages of hearing loss, including ringing and buzzing in the ears, or tinnitus. What’s making things dangerous today are the high volume that the music players project, the length of time people listen to them, and the design of new headphones. For many people today, listening to music has become an all-day event, as opposed to just an accompaniment to exercise or long family road trips. People listen while commuting, they listen while doing errands, and they listen while at home. Not only are there more occasions to use MP3 players, but battery life on the devices is also much longer than in generations past, so people can easily clock twelve to fifteen hours without a break. We also use headphones and music to drown out ambient noises that surround us—traffic, construction, or other nuisance noises—turning the volume way up to compensate. Modern headphones don’t help the problem, either. Most sets are “in-ear” canalphones, which focus all the sound output directly into the ear canal. Listening for a long time at a loud volume is the main contributor to NIHL. It’s generally safe to listen to noises up to 75 dB, but anything louder can begin to cause hearing loss. As the volume of the sound increases, the amount of safe listening time decreases, so although it’s safe to listen to 75 dB sounds for hours, it’s only safe to listen to a 90 dB sound for a few minutes. iPods have come under fire for featuring top volumes of up to 115 dB (the equivalent of standing next to a pneumatic drill), which can cause damage in as little as five minutes per day. Teenagers have been found to be particularly at risk, and a study at Children’s Hospital in Boston found that even though many teens kept their device’s volume http://www.carreraglassesstore.comat the maximum, they were unaware of just how loud the music was. Many teenagers also trust that all the manufacturer’s default volume settings are safe for their ears.