Can't you just turn up the volume?

I'd say it's more from the pushing on the sides of my head, not so much from the volume of the music. But you are right, and I have been thinking about stopping listening to music trough headphones when working, and use speakers.

> If you're sitting with headphones on for six hours, maybe you should get up a few times.

I have to say that my current working desk and rhythm is pretty much perfect as far as I know. My eyes never get tired, the screens are a good distance away from me, and I don't have to look down. I have a decent computer chair, and I take breaks about every hour, to go outside or get a new cup of coffee (but I do that with my headphones/earbuds in).

Heck, no employee can offer a better working situation if you ask me, I'm all for the working remote - office not required-idea! :P

It would be like an article about a camera talking about its fast f/1.4 shutter speed.

The issue isn't necessarily about all "earbuds," the issue is that many earbuds (including the ones included with Apple iOS products) don't seal the ear canal very well, so a listener is exposed to outside sounds in addition to sounds from the player. Since the outside sounds have a tendency to mask the sounds coming from the earbuds, the listener will often turn up the volume to better hear the audio material and therefore be exposed to SPL's that can cause hearing damage over long exposure times.

The advice to use something like the Superlux HD 681 is that circumaural headphones offer some (not a lot, but some) shielding from outside noise, so a user won't be tempted to increase the volume level as much. Active noise canceling headsets and in-ear-monitors (like Etymotics-brand) provide better sound isolation so that users can keep the volume at more moderate levels.

So in short: very few people can actually talk safely while driving, and the people that think they can probably can't.

An MBC uses intelligent design instead of a one-size-fits-all method. With the right data about your hearing pattern, it can mash the full sound into your range so that you get all the information you need.

Audio engineer here. That is patently untrue. MBC is a super-useful technique and is indeed helpful for mitigating hearing loss in relatively transparent fashion, but it does not and cannot bring sounds from outside someone's audible hearing range back within it. It will dynamically rebalance incoming audio in inverse proportion to the degree of hearing loss within a set of frequency ranges, but many kinds of sensorineural hearing loss involve the death of cilia cells (the tiny hairs thatvibrate at particular frequencies, much like the bins of of an FFT) which can result in a total loss of perception at or above certain frequencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss

To 'mash the full sound into your range' requires a technique known as frequency shifting, but that's problematic because it destroys the harmonic relationships of the incoming material and sounds disorienting, at best.

In any case, I think the illustration of the bear on the tricycle is absurdly simplistic and makes me wonder to what the degree the pp designers really grasp the underlying concept. A much more appropriate parallel would have been to show an image with a severe Gaussian blur, which more closely parallels the actual experience of hearing loss in terms of both empirical measurement (higher frequencies tend to be more severely attenuated in cases of induced hearing loss) and subjective experience (blurring hinders edge detection, which is analogous to transient detection in audio, and which has a large role in speech intelligibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur

If you're struggling with hearing loss, then you should really, really consult an audiologist, work out the basis of your hearing loss (which is sometimes as simple as impacted earwax), and work out a treatment strategy. If you're suffering from degenerative hearing loss then listening to overly-compressed music could actually accelerate it, and listening on headphones or earbuds (many of which bias the sound for increased impact) could also contribute to the problem. It's a truism in the pro audio world that most people are awful at self-measurement and tend to over-equalize in the absence of proper experimental control protocols.

I apologize for the rather negative tone of the post; I appreciate the people at SoundFocus are trying to provide people with something useful and helpful at minimal cost, by leveraging the pretty good audio hardware in their phone. However, hearing loss tends to be a one-way thing, and I think that offering a product to that market without a clinician on the team is a bad idea. There's a lot more to being an 'audio ninja' than understanding the fundamentals of DSP.