AV Tip: Safe Listening Levels

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, or in this case, their hearing. Even a modest sound system is capable of delivering sufficiently high SPLs to cause significant damage to your hearing over time. Investing in an SPL meter can be useful for things like system setup, but it is also an important tool to let you know whether you are indeed getting too much of a good thing. Have fun, but be careful!

You can stop by your local Radio Shack and pickup an SPL meter for about $50, or buy one online. As a cheaper alternative you can download an SPL meter app for your iOS or Android device; however, they are not as accurate as a stand alone SPL meter.

Once you are armed with your SPL meter, you can use the table below to help you gauge what is a safe listening level. 

Source: http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/spldose.htm

The table shows a comparison among three different organizations and what they think is the maximum amount of time a person can hear a sound before it is damaging. As you can see, the recommendations are different because the methodology is different, but each is based off of cumulative exposure over a period of time (ie. 24hr). Still, there are some general principles that are useful in the home theater realm. Never listen to anything >115dB for sustained periods of time and even loud scenes around 100dB should be severely limited in exposure. If you find yourself at an event that is too loud but you cannot turn the volume down, try a pair of tuned earplugs. The V-Moda faders are a cheap way to bring down the volume but maintain high sound quality.

Source: Steve81 & Cliff Heyne