Week of January 1, 2006

Even though the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was all over the tech news this week, a much more important family-tech story was picked up by news outlets worldwide...

Music fans, listen to this!

Everyone using an iPod - or any MP3 player - needs to read this story. Pete Townshend, The Who guitarist, announced publicly that it was his use of earphones in the recording studio, not the loud music he played on stage, that caused irreparable damage to his hearing (he "has to take 36-hour breaks between recording sessions to allow his ears to recover," the Associated Press reports).

Earbuds are the worst culprit. "In a study published last year in the journal Ear and Hearing, researchers at Harvard Medical School looked at a variety of headphones and found that, on average, the smaller they were, the higher their output levels at any given volume-control setting." Because tiny phones in ears so far don't do a good enough job of blocking outside sounds, people compensate by cranking up the volume. Northwestern University audiologist and professor Dean Garsecki told the Scripps Howard News Service that he has a colleague at Wichita State U. who pulls earbuds out of students' ears and asks them if he can measure their output. He often finds them listening at about rock concert level - "enough to cause hearing loss after only about an hour and 15 minutes," Scripps Howard reports. And an Australian study found that about a quarter of iPod users 18-54 listen at volumes sufficient to cause hearing damage.

The BBC quotes an entry in Townshend's Web site as saying, "I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf. My intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead."

What to do? "The rule of thumb suggested by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital is to hold the volume of a music player no higher than 60% of the maximum, and use it for only about an hour a day," Scripps Howard reports.

MP3 players flying off shelves

Meanwhile, even as Pete issues his warning, the organizers of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) release figures showing that MP3 players will be huge in 2006. The BBC cites CES figures showing that sales of music players "soared by 200% in 2005 to $3bn (£1.73bn)," with the projection for 2006 being $4.5 billion. Keep an eye on the volume level of those earbuds, people! BTW, the Beeb adds that Nos. 2 and 3 at CES are game consoles and flat screens, respectively.

In Other News

  • Downloads up, CDs down. The trend continues, and it's bad news for brick-'n'-mortar music stories. 602.2, down from 650.8 11/12/25 Album sales were down 7% last year from 2004, the Associated Press reports, but sales of tunes from the online music services were up 148% over 2004's. That sounds fabulous for the recording industry, but 95% of music is sold in CD format.
  • 2006: 'Golden Age of gaming'? That's the view of UK gamemaker David Braben. In a commentary at the BBC, he likens this juncture in the gaming industry to the 1930s for filmmaking, when movies went from sheer spectacle to serious artform. He says that now, for gaming, the artistic content is becoming "the main driver." The BBC's gaming editor adds that "over the next 12 months, the most powerful piece of technology in the home is likely to be the games console in the living room, rather than the PC in the bedroom." The explanation is not just next-generation graphics and games, it's media convergence - that word that keeps coming up in turn-of-the-year reporting. These consoles play other media, too, and they are communications tools as well (witness Xbox Live's voice and text chat and text alerts on cellphones).
  • The latest on kid phones. Regular cellphones and young children don't mix, many parents find, for security reasons (another way to talk to strangers) and financial ones (still more uncontrolled minutes!). "No, if you're going to issue your child a cellphone, it had better be ultra-simple, ultra-limited, ultra-rugged and ultra-parent-controlled," writes New York Times tech writer David Pogue in his review of Verizon's LG Migo, The Firefly, and the Enfora TicTalk.
  • The appeal of text to teens. "Presence," convenience, and a degree of anonymity are three big reasons why teenagers love text messaging on phones, computers, and other devices. The article in the Detroit News blurs any distinction between the devices pretty much the way teenagers do. "Presence" is simply the ability to know if friends are available for chatting. Convenience is obvious - kids say IM and texting is more convenient than talking. The anonymity issue is interesting. Teens like texting because they can communicate directly but slightly indirectly at the same time.
  • Parents pay for school laptops? That's what's expected of parents in Fullerton, Calif., USATODAY reports. "The public school system in this quiet city 27 miles southeast of Los Angeles is pushing the frontiers of computer technology in the classroom with a program that puts a laptop computer into the backpacks of children as early as first grade. It is pushing the boundaries of financing, too, by asking parents to pay $500 a year for three years so each of more than 2,000 elementary and middle school children can have their own Apple iBook G4 laptop." The program, at four of the district's 20 schools has created a storm of controversy, USATODAY adds. District officials say parents who can't afford the $1,500 can get financial aid.

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