Video gamers worldwide may be risking irreversible hearing loss and/or tinnitus—persistent ringing/buzzing in the ears—finds a systematic review of the available evidence, published in the open access journal BMJ Public Health.
What evidence there is suggests that the sound levels reported in studies of more than 50,000 people often near, or exceed, permissible safe limits, conclude the researchers.
And given the popularity of these games, greater public health efforts are needed to raise awareness of the potential risks, they urge.
While headphones, earbuds, and music venues have been recognized as sources of potentially unsafe sound levels, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects of video games, including e-sports, on hearing loss, say the researchers.
Volume sliders never sound linear to me. I also keep them fairly low. This means that each individual step is surprisingly large in volume difference. I don’t get people who go to max volume-- doesn’t it hurt your ears? My laptop stays on 10-20% and some applications are turned down from that even further (TF2 is comically low).
Ironically that is because (with very few exceptions) every application from OS-s to streaming service webapps to games to mediaplayers uses linear volume slider. Human hearing is logarithmic.
The way typical volume slider works is multiplying the audio sample values with a coefficient that is ≤1. Ie, if you set volume to 50% the input is multiplied by 0.5 and as a result the signal voltage level on the analog output to your headphone or loudspeaker drivers is halved. The kicker—halving the voltage is just 6 dB less volume. This is why if you have sensitive headphones (or big, powerful speakers) you find that you have to keep the volume slider in your OS at 10% or even lower to not blast your ears off. And why the upper half of volume sliders is completely useless.
I have an unconventional speaker setup that makes classical analog volume control completely impractical. Since said setup has the maximum sound pressure level output of around 110 dB at full scale digital input, I have to keep the OS volume slider at 30% and in-app volume sliders at around 20%, resulting the total multiplier of 0.06 (or about -26dB full scale) to have comfortable volume levels. Only exception is Elite: Dangerous; with sound set to full dynamic range I can keep the main volume slider at maximum and enjoy glorious dynamics. Youtube is also surprisingly reasonable, probably because they normalize to -14dB LUTS or something similar.
I wonder if linux has a logarithmic sound driver… might tempt me to the dark side!
Are you using Bluetooth headphones?
If so, you might want to look into turning off bluetooth absolute volume. It’s supposed to keep volume syncronised between your bluetooth device and your phone/laptop/etc, but some headphones don’t seem to support it, wich can end up with them setting their internal volume to max.
No, they’re wired, although weirdly they can desync (per-ear!) after a restart until you change the volume again. Thanks for the tip though :)
Actually while I’m here, do you know how to turn off headphone media controls? My headphones don’t have it but when I move my aux cord around windows thinks they’re sending commands and likes to pause my videos >:(