European officials are bothering themselves once more about the hearing of us music fans. They are moving forward with plans to make digital music player manufacturers provide more advice to users on safe volume levels when using headphones.
According to EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, Euro-types may make it compulsory for player makers to set volume limiters at 80 decibels. Users would be able to increase this, of course, but would be advised against doing so through health warnings on packaging. Some health types say that increased use of head-phone based music players are damaging the hearing of young music consumers.
Obviously this isn't really a new problem - walkmen and discmen users ran the same risks - though new technology does probably mean that players and headphones are capable of outputting ever increasing volumes of music.