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News You Can Use: Hearing Protection

Joyce Cohen on hearing protection beyond earplugs. I often wear noise-cancelling headphones on BART; now I will wear them more often. Does the New York subway damage hearing?

The trouble with marching bands. New York noise.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “News You Can Use: Hearing Protection”

  1. Peter Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 11:18 am

    I prefer my Etymotic isolation earbuds to the noise-cancelling headphones. Smaller, cheaper, and I think they sound better. Some people don’t like things in their ears, however.

    I wonder how much hearing gets damaged on airplanes. The small jets are really loud if you’re sitting in the back. Fortunately at least some airlines are now letting people keep earbuds in (unplugged) during takeoff and landing, when it’s loudest.

  2. Chris Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    While noise cancelling headphones would help you feel more at peace by reducing the variation in noise, wouldn’t they still hurt your physical hearing since the overall decible level is actually higher? I thought noise cancellation works by adding more noise so a 60 decible noise becomes unnoticable but you get that effect by adding 20dbs of cancelling noise.

    I guess if the goal is to make the world quieter in the long term even when you’re not wearning noise cancelling headsets, it’s working :)

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