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Digital
Another report says iPods could be damaging your hearing
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 21 April 2010
OK, it’s not just iPods. But another medical report has highlighted the potential risk to music fans’ hearing posed by digital music players like the Apple device, which can play music much louder than the portable music devices kids of the eighties and nineties used to be glued to.
Various reports in recent years have raised concerns that iPod users might be damaging their hearing by turning the volume up too high, and some have called for limiters to be introduced so that MP3 player users can’t listen to music at a volume that could damage their ears. New European regulations will insist digital music players are set, by default, at a safer volume, though users will be able to override that setting and turn things up.
A Yale professor, Peter M Rabinowitz, has written about the issue in the British Medical Journal, and says that the medical profession has failed to keep up with the rapid growth of new digital technology which plays music via headphones at potentially dangerous volumes. He writes: “As with mobile phones, the use of personal music players has grown faster than our ability to assess their potential health consequences”.
He admits there is no conclusive evidence that increased use of digital music players is resulting in a rise of hearing problems, but he says: “Several small studies have found that reported use of personal music players is associated with worse hearing function in adolescents and young adults”.
The Royal National Institute For The Deaf told the Guardian that Rabinowitz is right to raise the alarm on this issue, saying: “Our research shows 66% of personal music player users are listening to music at louder than 85 decibels, which according to the World Health Organisation, can cause permanent hearing damage over time”.
