Interview: Monika McMahon chats Noiselace Necklaces - Fashionable Earplugs for Concert Fans!

I got to meet Monika during my recent adventure out at the Firefly 2014 Music Festival with the Microsoft Lumia and MixRadio crews. She's a concert and travel blogger who created the Noiselace Necklace, a MUCH more fashionable way to protect your hearing while out at shows than traditional gummy earplugs. She joined me for a quick chat about Noiselace, concerts, and going Paleo.



Noiselace Necklaces: http://www.noiselace.com/
Noiselace on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Noiselace
Monika on Twitter: https://twitter.com/monikarun

FFC VLOG - Firefly 2014 Music Festival!

Stop Hearing Loss With Antioxidants?

I wonder if this really helps.
I was always under the assumption that once you lost hearing, it NEVER came back.

Is there anything I can do to prevent my mild deafness from worsening as I age?

ROBERT ANDERSON, M.D., REPLIES: Yes. Researchers believe that as we age, cumulative exposure to everyday noise and occasional incidents of excessively loud noise damage delicate hearing cells to cause mild deafness. Fortunately, the following measures can slow, stabilize, or even reverse this process. Here's what to do:
Wear Ear Protection. Wear headphones or ear plugs whenever you may be exposed to more than 85 decibels of noise, like when you use a lawn mower or a chain saw, or attend a rock concert.
Make (and Take) Antioxidants. Large amounts of superoxide dismutase, an antioxidant, helped prevent noise-related hearing damage in animal experiments. Your body makes superoxide dismutase; to ensure that you produce enough, take 15 to 30 mg of zinc and 15 mg of manganese daily. Taking antioxidant supplements can also reduce the risk of noise-induced deafness, according to studies. Take 25,000 IU of mixed carotenoids, 5,000 to 10,000 IU of vitamin A (do not take more than 5,000 IU if you're pregnant or planning to be), 1 to 2 g of vitamin C, and 400 IU of natural vitamin E (d-alpha tocopherol) daily. The vitamin A and C doses are high because your body needs more of them when exposed to stress (like loud noise). Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) may also help stabilize hearing loss. Take 80 to 120 mg of ginkgo daily.
Nix Nutrient Deficiencies. People with age-related hearing impairment have been shown to have 40 percent lower levels of vitamin [B.sub.12] and 30 percent lower levels of folic acid compared to those with normal hearing. To stabilize hearing, take a daily B complex that has at least 400 mcg of [B.sub.12] and 400 mcg of folic acid. Studies have also connected a vitamin D deficiency with chronic hearing loss, so take 400 IU daily.
Cut Out Cow's Milk. Occasionally, I have found that partially deaf patients who completely avoided dairy products and other foods containing whey, like luncheon meats and puddings, returned their hearing to normal. Researchers found high amounts of a protein molecule identical to one in cow's milk in the cochleae (hearing organs) of 89 percent of patients with age-related hearing loss, while people with normal hearing had none, according to a 1994 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Audio Guy Mailbag: A Question on Earbuds

This is a perfect follow up to my post about Dr. Kiki.

So earbuds are bad. Are headphones any better than earbuds?
-B.A.K.

I guess I should clarify. It's not that earbuds themsleves are bad for you, it's how we use them that's the problem.
In the past there has always been a limit to how much we can bombard our ears with directly. A tape would have to be flipped, a cd would be over in under an hour, double A batteries would run out, something would prevent you from being able to saturate your ears for too long. Now with mp3 players (with built in, all day lasting batteries) there's no reason not to soak your ears in sound all day and all night.

Earbuds (the cheap kind that normally come with mp3 players) SUCK for this kind use. They don't create ANY seal around the outside of the ear, so your music is competing with the noise in your environment. The only way to combat that is to turn the volume up higher. The louder the volume, the less time you have before you're doing subtle (but possibly permanent) damage to your hearing.

The alternative is to use ANYTHING with some kind of noise reduction. I like inner-aural earbuds (the kind with rubber or foam that go INSIDE your ear canal), but some people think they're uncomfortable.
You could also check out headphones that have active noise removal (but that might mean keeping some batteries on hand). Regardless, if you can strip out the noise of your surrounding environment, then you can listen to your music at a lower volume, without sacrificing the quality of music (in fact, it'll probably sound better for it), which should give you more listening time before you exhaust your ears.
Right now I use Sennheiser CX300's for listening to music, and Sennheiser HD25-1 II's for recording. I guess I'm just a Sennheiser kinda guy...

At the turn of the millenium, white earbuds were a fashion statement.
Now?
Toss em. They're crap.

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PopSiren's Dr. Kiki explains how earbuds work

So, you should REALLY be watching PopSiren. I think it's one of Revision3's most ambitious shows yet (and Heather Frank is pretty bad ass). The show, hosted by Sarah Lane and Jessica Corbin, covers all manner of subjects from lifehacking to DIY, and Dr. Kiki covers a lot of "Mr. Wizard"- like topics (like making fire dance with sound waves).

In their most recent episode Dr. Kiki demonstrated how earbud headphones work. Being the A/V nerd that I am, how could I NOT be totally stoked. I've written about earbuds before, and was really happy to hear Dr. Kiki also warn her audience about the possible hearing damage associated with cheap earbuds.

Here's Episode 6 of PopSiren, but you should really subscribe to this show with something like Miro.
Enjoy!

someaudioguy some audio guy music voice over hearing headphones recording equipment voice acting demo production adr dubbing

Apple forcing us to turn down the volume?

So, this story isn't new, been floating around teh intarwebs since before Xmas (and I've written about this before), but I still think it's worth taking a quick look at.
The Telegraph reported on Dec 23rd, that Apple has filed a patent that would allow future iPods to calculate how long you've been listening to music, at what volume you've been listening, and would gradually turn down the volume on you. This is supposed to be a big magnanimous gesture on Apple's part, as people can plug into music all day long thanks to huge amounts of storage available. As hearing loss can be a gradual event, most people might not even know they're doing damage.
This idea sounds great in theory (like a rev limiter on car helps save fuel and forces you to not do something too stupid), but I see some huge flaws.

First off, will this be a feature we can turn off? It sounds like a silly question at first, but Apple has shown a tendency (as do a lot of tech companies) towards locking consumers into doing things their way because they "know better" (iPhone I'm looking at you). If Mommies and Daddies get concerned about little Timmy's Nano, Jobs & Co could make this a new locked in "feature" to assuage concerns, or make it painfully difficult to disable.
Why would I want to turn it off? Well the majority of the time I listen to my iPod it's usually plugged into speakers of some kind. Also I hate proprietary docks and connectors, so I plug my Nano in using the headphone jack. In my car I have a line in, and at home my stereo has an "MP3 port" (which is just a fancy way of saying "line in"). In both cases I'll jack the Nano to about 80% volume and then control the actual speaker output via the stereo. If this system is monitoring the ipods output it's going to think I'm blasting my ears for hours at a time. I don't want to be fighting my MP3 player while driving...

Secondly, this issue with people listening to music too loud for too long is mostly Apple's fault at this point. A lot of people credit the success of the ipod with the distinctive design of the white earbuds. Well guess what? Those are HORRIBLE for your ears! They don't create any seal around the ear's opening, so your music is constantly having to compete with the sounds around you. The louder the noise, the louder you'll have to turn up your music. The ipod is a fantastic DAP. The headphones included are the worst dime store crap you could put in your ears.
If Apple really cared about protecting people's hearing, they would drop these headphones immediately, or would include an accessory like the Griffin Ear Jams to help with the problem. Even the Zune includes "premium" headphones which help with noise cancellation, and should allow people to enjoy music at lower volume.

When I do listen to Nano with headphones, it's either on Sony EX51's (pictured) or Sennheiser cx300's. Even when working out, I have a hard time listening above 50% volume, which according to the Telegraph (sidebar), is about as noisy as a loud restaurant or office building, and shouldn't damage the ears for about 24 hours of listening. That's a lot of music...



Check out the article @ The Telegraph. It is an interesting read, though I really think Apple might be missing the point.