The danger linked to damaging your ears due to listening to excessively loud music for long periods of time has always been present. And no matter how many studies are published on the subject, people refuse to pay heed.
This is probably one of the main reasons why tech giant Google is working its own magic and trying to launch a new feature that helps to protect users’ hearing so they can hear their favorite tunes without feeling a sense of guilt or worry. After all, no one wants irreversible damage done to their hearing.
The new feature is designed to generate an alert as a safety precaution so that whenever the volume of the device is increased to a dangerous level, a new warning gets generated. Therefore, if you want to pay heed, great, but if not, simply ignore it.
But seeing Android 14 get super active in this respect and ensure users’ hearing is protected at all times through headphones is definitely the right way to begin.
People that may not be familiar with this kind of feature are probably unaware of how devices from Google that are on sale in the EU end up producing warnings through headphones that are linked to a user who makes attempts to raise volume below a certain dB, which is close to 85. Now, users can accept the alert and go on further increasing that to 100 dB. But please note that after a span of 20 hours, you’ll get another warning about the hazards of the behavior.
The EU rolled out this feature as a safety precaution for all devices featuring audio across the EU. Moreover, we know how Android’s warnings in this respect are outlined to follow a long list of recommendations inside the document that has gone through a series of revisions over a number of years.
This new offering is dubbed Headphone Loud Sound and it’s basically a warning that was made public at Google’s I/O this year. And the company says it’s great for those using audio for long periods of time which can really have damaging effects on users’ health.
Now the question is how exactly the feature works. Thanks to the company’s latest source code release, we saw Google roll out descriptions regarding the sound alert and how it uses computed sound doses as compared to how others make use of volume indexes that are fixed in design.
This would ensure an analysis of frequency is conducted to gauge how loud a sound has become and how harmful it is in the long term too. Google has launched a series of warnings that keep popping up when the user has been exposed to a certain threshold. So you can safely listen for a while and then you’ll again be notified of what you’re doing wrong.
So from 1X to 4X, alerts are produced and users are guided to lower volumes to much safer limits. When you reach the 5X threshold, the volume is automatically lowered to ensure no damage is done. How’s that for a caring feature?
Google says the feature would not be enabled through default settings on Android 14 so that means it needs to be done manually. And if you’re wondering whether or not Android already had such a feature enabled then the answer is no.
What it did include were features for volume limits that ensure safe media consumption. The latter simply warns users about hearing loud sounds above the recommended threshold. And as far as the launch of the feature is concerned, it should be coming in the next few months so stay tuned.
H/T: Mishaal Rahman
Read next: Chrome's Secure Surf: HTTPS Warriors Battle Sneaky HTTP Stragglers
This is probably one of the main reasons why tech giant Google is working its own magic and trying to launch a new feature that helps to protect users’ hearing so they can hear their favorite tunes without feeling a sense of guilt or worry. After all, no one wants irreversible damage done to their hearing.
The new feature is designed to generate an alert as a safety precaution so that whenever the volume of the device is increased to a dangerous level, a new warning gets generated. Therefore, if you want to pay heed, great, but if not, simply ignore it.
But seeing Android 14 get super active in this respect and ensure users’ hearing is protected at all times through headphones is definitely the right way to begin.
People that may not be familiar with this kind of feature are probably unaware of how devices from Google that are on sale in the EU end up producing warnings through headphones that are linked to a user who makes attempts to raise volume below a certain dB, which is close to 85. Now, users can accept the alert and go on further increasing that to 100 dB. But please note that after a span of 20 hours, you’ll get another warning about the hazards of the behavior.
The EU rolled out this feature as a safety precaution for all devices featuring audio across the EU. Moreover, we know how Android’s warnings in this respect are outlined to follow a long list of recommendations inside the document that has gone through a series of revisions over a number of years.
This new offering is dubbed Headphone Loud Sound and it’s basically a warning that was made public at Google’s I/O this year. And the company says it’s great for those using audio for long periods of time which can really have damaging effects on users’ health.
Now the question is how exactly the feature works. Thanks to the company’s latest source code release, we saw Google roll out descriptions regarding the sound alert and how it uses computed sound doses as compared to how others make use of volume indexes that are fixed in design.
This would ensure an analysis of frequency is conducted to gauge how loud a sound has become and how harmful it is in the long term too. Google has launched a series of warnings that keep popping up when the user has been exposed to a certain threshold. So you can safely listen for a while and then you’ll again be notified of what you’re doing wrong.
So from 1X to 4X, alerts are produced and users are guided to lower volumes to much safer limits. When you reach the 5X threshold, the volume is automatically lowered to ensure no damage is done. How’s that for a caring feature?
Google says the feature would not be enabled through default settings on Android 14 so that means it needs to be done manually. And if you’re wondering whether or not Android already had such a feature enabled then the answer is no.
What it did include were features for volume limits that ensure safe media consumption. The latter simply warns users about hearing loud sounds above the recommended threshold. And as far as the launch of the feature is concerned, it should be coming in the next few months so stay tuned.
H/T: Mishaal Rahman
Read next: Chrome's Secure Surf: HTTPS Warriors Battle Sneaky HTTP Stragglers
