Is a sound level of 105 decibels for a few seconds enough to rupture a person's eardrum?
Is a sound level of 105 decibels for a few seconds enough to rupture a person's eardrum?
In 2022, a Texas family filed a lawsuit against Apple for damaging their son's hearing after an Amber Alert went off while he was wearing Airpods. According to Google, the maximum volume of phone headphones is around 105 decibels. The family are claiming that the son now requires hearing aids after his eardrum ruptured.
Is this plausible?
No not a few seconds. Ever walked near a jackhammer 130dB in the street for a few seconds? That is significantly louder. In general anything over 85dB for a significant amount of time causes damage. Concerts top out at around 110dB and you don't see people popping eardrums there.
However if you have an ear infection so some other type of damage then maybe?
I read Texas so I'm going to assume it was due to shooting guns
it's worth keeping in mind that dB fall off very quickly over distance and having a jackhammer right up next to your ear is different from passing a few feet beside it
Yes that's why dB measurements are always done in open air from 1 meter distance.
edit: Headphone measurements are obviously different and are optimally measured at the distance the eardrum sits from the speaker element, with similar encasing as the headphone model offers. For In-ear, it's a very low distance and a high level of encasing. Airpods will obviously not make 105 dB at 1 meter.
The 105 decibels is the max headphone output as it's placed in the ear.
I can answer this conclusively for you, ear canals do not act as neither echo chambers or are subject to resonances for audible frequencies.
If they did you would have a literal ringing in your ears.
Sound pressure falls off as a function of the square of the distance. So if that jackhammer is 3 m away you are only receiving 11% of the sound energy that the operator is.
I think it's very different if it is a clean digital noise. Acoustic sounds, even when loud, have a brief ramping up. Digital noise can appear like a wall from zero to 110dB in literally zero time for the ear to adjust.
The ear has tiny hairs that
raise to absorb sound and protect the hearing(see comment for a correction). I know of somebody that had a digital noise cut right through them and cause permanent hearing loss. Their hairs were flattened and no longer work. I don't know the amplitude though.This makes no sense. For sound to actually become sound, it becomes acoustic by definition. It cannot be sound unless it moves the air or any other element that can move Soundwaves.
Just want to chime in and mention those tiny hairs aren't protective. They're hair cells, named because they have tufts of stereocilia, and are what your ear actually uses to hear. When they die, you lose hearing. There are two types, inner and outer, and while the outer can influence the amount of sound detected by the inner hair cells, they can only amplify, not reduce.
The ear protects itself against loud sounds by contracting the tensor tympani and stapedius muscles, dampening the eardrum and tensing and shifting back the ossicles, the small hearing bones of the ear. This all serves to reduce the amount of force transmitted to the inner ear but takes time to occur, so it can't protect against sudden loud noises, like a gunshot.
You're almost right in so many aspects it unfortunately becomes utterly wrong.
Digital and analog noise aren't real things, or at least not the words that are used for it. Digital and analog noise has to do with signals and frequency spectrums, not with the actual pressure differentials that are physical sound waves.
But there is a similar concept, where a thing happening can create a strong pressure wave, typically called an air blast, and are common when talking about blasting and other explosions (where the pressure wave is significant, but not really a noise). Ear pods do not create a significant pressure wave.
The ear does have tiny hairs for hearing, and they do break at sudden and loud noises (@soleinvictus explained our defence mechanisms brilliantly in another reply) and also at repeated exposure to loud noises. A breakage typically results in partial, temporary, hearing loss and "ringing in your ears", whereas permanent death of the sensory cells leads to tinnitus, which isn't the same as hearing damage/loss.