Protect Your Ears with Headphones

Are you a music lover? Can’t workout at the gym without your tunes or go to sleep at night without the iPod? If so, you should know you are at risk for noise-induced hearing loss. Headphones may help you protect your ears.

The iPod problem

Most people listen to their iPod or another MP3 player with earbuds. These earbuds are small, compact and deliver the sound directly into your ear. It’s a recipe for disaster. Those damaging sounds are headed straight to the sensitive hair cells in your inner ear. Hair cells are not hairs, but they resemble hairs. Thousands of these little cells are on your cochlea hard at work converting those incoming sounds into electrical signals that the auditory nerve delivers to the brain. When these little guys get damaged, it is not reversible. Noise damages the hair cells permanently.

At its loudest, an iPod can deliver 103 decibels. The National Institutes for Health pegs the level at which noise damage begins at 85 decibels. This is far less than what those earbuds can deliver.

How headphones provide protection

Over the ear headphones do more than provide protection from outside noise. Because they cancel the noise around you, you can listen to your music at a much lower level. Earbuds don’t cancel surrounding noise, and because of this, you to turn up the volume to unhealthy levels. Headphones prevent this from happening. The headphones listen for atmospheric or background noise and create a signal that mimics that sound. Then through the miracle of preprocessing, it inverts that sound which has the result of completely canceling it.

Headphones don’t deliver sound directly into the ear canal. Because earbuds deliver sound into the ear canal, they cause about a nine-decibel increase in sound, no matter what volume level you use. Headphones also deliver sound at a greater fidelity. The increased fidelity means you are more apt to listen at a lower level.

Listen safely

Whether you listen with earbuds or headphones be sure to listen safely. This means you should never turn the volume up past the 60 percent mark. Audiologists also recommend that you limit the amount of time you listen to no more than 60 minutes a day. If you go to sleep at night listening to music or audiobooks, be sure to use a timer to turn off the player.

Protect your ears with headphones and you will be able to enjoy the music for years to come.