Puro Sound Labs: Volume Limited HP's for kids

[TitaniumTroy]

Just bought a pair for my 10 yrs old nephew, I bought the Junior Jams model with daisy chain technology. Which allows two headphones to listen the same source with a cable connecting the HP's. Volume is limited to 85db.
https://purosound.com
"Why do we care so much about Noise-induced hearing loss? It’s personal.

In 2014 our founder, Dave Russell, learned that his youngest daughter, Niki, had developed Noise-induced hearing loss. The doctors told them the culprit was on her head everyday on the way to school, her headphones.

For America’s youth, hearing loss is a growing epidemic. Today, one in five teens suffer from some form of hearing loss, a 31% increase since the mid-90s. The driving force of this growth is that 50% of teens and young adults age 12-35 are exposed to unsafe levels of sound from their personal music players. To put that in perspective, that amounts to roughly 1.1 billion teens and young adults worldwide."

 

[Flint]

Dr. Koss of the famous Koss headphone company took on this cause decades ago and funded hearing protection activities. He worked hard both in getting the message out and forcing the government to put warnings on headphones packaging and even the warning you get on your smartphone about listening at high levels. That was his major calling for a long time and he spent a ton of his personal time and money driving that message.

Pete Townsend also donated a massive amount of money to the same cause.

The problem for most young adults, as I see it, is the sheer number of events, parties, clubs, concerts, and raves where the sound pressure levels are extremely excessive. They know the levels are high, but since they are so common at established locations, they assume that someone would do something if it were a real public threat - thus those levels much be acceptable and relatively safe. The live party/concert scene, to me, is contributing to the problem of hearing loss in our youth.

Meanwhile, electronic level control is inconsistent since every headphone has a different sensitivity. One pair might be limited to RMS SPLs of 90dB, while another with the same voltage limitations might be 100dB RMS SPL. The headphones/earphones need to be taken into account when creating an electronic limiting technology.