Prolonged Exposure May Result in Hearing Loss

Listening with the volume turned to 11 for hours can create hearing loss. An August 2010 study by the Journal of the American Medical Association found 20 percent of teens in the United States have slight hearing loss. The losses mean that certain consonants can’t be heard, and rustling sounds are also lost. The affected teens were reported listening to high-volume music using headphones for at least five years.

Prolonged noise exposure to any sounds higher than 85 decibels is bad for hearing. To put it in perspective, normal conversation clocks in at 65 db. Hair dryers and lawnmowers clock in at 90 db. A jet plane on takeoff comes in at 120 db, and listening to music through headphones is likely at 100 db.

How do you know if you’ve reached that 85 dB threshold? A good way to keep it under the magic number is to keep your headphone volume at roughly 70 percent of the maximum and 80 percent for ear buds on an iPod (the difference is derived from the insertion into the ear canal of the ear buds). If the headphones are not sound-isolating, you should be able to hear a person who is about an arm’s length away talking to you. If you can’t, your headphone volume is likely too loud.

Most MP3 or streaming players can generate sound that hits 120 decibels, which is the equivalent of a rock concert. Exposure to that level of sound can cause hearing loss after just 75 minutes of continuous exposure. Hearing loss symptoms can include a ringing, hissing or buzzing sound in the ear without any stimulus; difficulty hearing in noisy rooms; and the need to listen to the television, radio or other devices with a higher than usual volume.

Unfortunately, not all hearing loss presents itself immediately. Most hearing loss goes away after an hour or so of quiet. But nerve synapses can be damaged by loud noise exposure, and the results of that damage may not manifest itself until later in life, when hearing loss is accelerated by such damage. This “hidden” hearing loss is not noticed at the time of exposure.