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FunkyHiFi
08-17-2010, 09:43 PM
"Can you hear me now? More teens can't"
(http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-teens-hearing-loss-20100818,0,559994.story)
Some excerpts...

......and many experts suspect they are the primary cause of hearing loss in teens.

"Personal stereos are the most important change in the culture in the last 15 to 20 years," said Dr. Tommie Robinson Jr., president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Assn. "Everybody has their own little device now, and how many times have you passed somebody and could hear their music?"The researchers found that the proportion of teens with any hearing loss rose from 14.9% in the first national survey to 19.5% in the second, while the proportion of mild or worse hearing loss rose 77%. Males were significantly more likely than females to suffer loss.....In English, soft high-frequency sounds such as "s," "f," "th" and "sh" "carry a great deal of meaning, and are very important sounds to be able to discern," Grimes said. But those are the first to be lost, especially in a noisy environment like a classroom.

And this strange finding:
For unknown reasons, children with light blue eyes are more likely to suffer hearing loss than those with other eye colors.

Nobody in the article is saying throw your player in the trash, just turn down the volume a bit.

EN[i]GMA
08-18-2010, 01:35 AM
If it's too loud, you're too old.

FunkyHiFi
08-18-2010, 04:49 PM
^ :(

That's not what the article is about, in other words, it's not a get-off-my-lawn type of rant.

It's easy to see that with the introduction of MP3 players (the iPod is included in that category), MANY teens & twenty-somethings abandoned conventional home systems - or never owned one in the first place - and now exclusively use these devices to listen to music. And in my experience, home systems and this includes component systems made up of a receiver + CD player + floorstanding speakers, in the typical teen's price range cannot reach the same i.e. friggin' loud volume level as a pair of earbuds inserted directly into the ear canal & driven by an MP3 player.

And overcompressed music very probably isn't helping either: this is the recording style used by many engineers the past decade or so (usually not by choice though - artists or label execs require them to do this) to make music sound "louder" no matter where the volume knob is set. And since such music for new albums AND many remastered classics - lacks the peaks and quiet levels found in actual music, IMO the resulting "wall of sound" is even more potentially damaging.

You can hear this on the video a music professor put together, which helped bring to light this nasty recording practice to the general public:

The Loudness Wars (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ) - featuring a Paul McCartney clip, the original and an overcompressed version.

It's only @2minutes and you don't need to be a professional recording engineer to understand what's happening - it's that bad. Remember though, Youtube audio isn't exactly audiophile quality, so listening to the actual recording on an MP3 player or home system will reveal this effect much better.

If old music ;) turns you off, the following page (written in Austin TX - music capital of the world! :)) contains an extensive article about this issue and you can listen to clips from two different Los Lonely Boys albums, "regular" and overcompressed:

http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html

More info for professional musicians:

http://www.turnmeup.org/