[vorbis] Ear damage by compressed audio?

[Geoff Shang]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Kasper Souren wrote:

> I can't tell whether this is really serious:
> http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Logologie/MP3-Gefahr/MP3-risk.html
>
> Some comments please!

Disclaimer: I have no idea about the science of this.

My initial reaction is, assuming the science is correct, surely this would
only be a problem if everything you listened to was produced by the
playing of lossily compressed audio.  but it's not.  In this room here
while I type my E-mail, I have the sound of two computers, my noisy
keyboard, my speech synthesiser, and any other random noise that might
infultrate from outside.  And this is at 4 in the morning.  During the day,
there'll be birds, trains, road trafic, and of course, the sound of my own
voice and that of my flatmate and anyone else I happen to talk to.  Lots of
non-compressed sounds, each of them having the potential to carry these
subsonics needed to calibrate my hearing.  So, until we all live in
sound-proof 1-person apartments with all our interactions taking place
through vertual reality computer-generated stuff, I don't think we have a
lot to worry about.

But like I say, I have no clue about the science of this, so what do I
know?

Geoff.

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