Teen hearing loss up - iPod blamed

[GA Russell]

Hearing loss among American teens jumped from 14.9% to 19.5%, and ear buds are blamed.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-17/one-in-five-u-s-adolescents-has-hearing-loss-researchers-find.html

[Christiern]

Let's not put all the blame on iPods. It was "ear buds," wasn't it?

[king ubu]

no no, guns don't kill!

[Dan Gould]

Pretty sure ear-pod design preceded the I-Pod. And did no one find a similar effect after cars became rolling boom boxes @ 300 db?

[bertrand]

Maybe they're just jacking off more.

Bertrand.

[Man with the Golden Arm]

what?

[king ubu]

as in:

of course

[BruceH]

Well, just proves what I've been saying for years: i-pods are evil.

(Or maybe just playing them too loudly is stupid.)

[PHILLYQ]

If my daily subway ride is any indication we will have a wave of deafness in the future. There are many young folks with their Ipod so loud that I can sing along from 10 feet away.

[papsrus]

Was thinking of a related thing earlier: I rarely play music loudly at all anymore. I prefer a level for listening through speakers at about the level where you could comfortably hold a conversation simultaneously. Maybe a tad louder, but not much.

Wasn't always that way. Used to love to blast the music. But now, once it gets above a comfortable conversation level, the louder it is the less I hear of what's going on.

Also, speaking of loud noises, I burnt some toast a few weeks ago and the security system smoke alarm went off inside the house. MAN! I'm telling you, that thing about blew my head off. Jet-engine, can't-think-straight loud. Couldn't figure out how to turn the damn thing off for a few minutes and had a pretty good headache going by the time I did.

Kind of reminds me of the time I was foraging around for laundry detergent and accidentally took a whiff of my college roommate's container full of chlorine powder he used for cleaning pools. Lost about 8 zillion brain cells in one shot on that one. But that's another story.

[A Lark Ascending]

And we really should stop these locomotive things...they'll stop the chickens laying properly.

Haven't the more recent iPods capped the volume available?

I think volume goes up not so much out of a desire to listen to music loudly rather than a desire to drown out surrounding noise.

[paul secor]

Anyone who's into volume rather than music deserves to lose their hearing.

[Brad]

When I'm on the subway or a noisy train and I hear people listening to their MP3s, you know that they've had to turn up the volume to hear the music. Tinnitis could become an epidemic. It's not a fun thing to suffer from.