ridiculous (Score 1)

No, not the article itself, but the habits of ipod people(hah a name for a bad 50's sci fi flick), and other people who use portable music devices. Bottomline, listening to a music player in a noisy environment is bad for your hearing.

Example, start out at home or in a very quiet environment, keep the volume at what you might consider an appropriate level of hearing. Now go to some place where there is more noise activity, that same volume will not be adequate. What is going on is that people are raising the volume in an attempt to drown out environmental noise. If the outside volume is at 70 decibles, people might raise the player volume to 80 or 90 decibles to listen to music. That can cause permanent hearing loss if exposed to long enough.

There are three options, a headphone/earbud set that is designed specifically to dampen outside noise. The best reduction headphones might get is 25 decibles. The other one would be the noise canceling type of headphones, but they only work for constant noise(like an airplane or a car, I had a pair that worked so good I just left them on for the flight because it reduced the engine noise). The most impractical would be to wear a pair of saftey earplugs and using headphones.

Again when none of these work well, it means the environmental noise is loud to the point where you shouldn't be trying to listen on a portable music player.