The Mayo Clinic warns that portable music devices put your hearing at risk.
“With the older devices, like the Walkman, if you turned them up all the way, they sounded very bad, so people didn’t do it. Now, they don’t sound bad at maximum volume, and that could pose a problem,” says Jodi Cook, Ph.D., director of the hearing aid program at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
According to Mayo, “if you keep the volume at a level where you can still comfortably carry on a conversation, you won’t need to limit the amount of time you listen to your music.”
The Mayo Clinic provides some guidelines to determine if your player is too loud:
- Your MP3 player volume is set higher than 60 percent of the maximum
- You can’t hear conversations going on around you
- People near you can hear your music
- You find yourself shouting instead of talking when you respond to people nearby
Source. The Mayo Clinic
