http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8279348.stm

Just come across the above on Auntie's website. Must confess that the idea pisses me off something chronic, as I will have to buy a replacement set of headphones as and when I get a new player due to them having a higher impedance to the average cack handed out as stock.

I thought a limit on the headphone output power was imposed over a decade ago. I certainly remember them talking about it, and noticed a significant drop in most players output not long after. It caused a problem for me because the music on hold input to a lot of phone systems expected a higher output, so suddenly we couldn't use a lot of cheaper tape decks with no line level output.

*goes off to look*

Pile of crap. Why not educate people to not be such idiots, instead of penalising everyone regardless?

If teenagers are too dumb to realise that they are f**king their hearing up then that's their problem, not mine as a sensible music afficianado.

All it's going to do is say "warning, that's really loud".

My Nokia already does that.

What is the problem of restricting the output to a level below that which will cause permanent damage to the ear?

Because next the government will be deciding how much salt I can eat, or how much alcohol I can drink.

To me, it is just simple health and safety.

If you work in a noisy environment, you have to wear ear protectors, so you don't permanently damage your hearing, conversely, if you are wearing earphones, they should be restricted to a level that doesn't damage your hearing. It is simply common sense, I don't know why they make them so loud that they could damage hearing in the first place...

It shouldn't need government legislation, I agree there, but the manufacturers should be sensible enough not to sell such products in the first place.

Hold on they do that already. They have salt guidelines and recommendations for alcohol intake. Or were you being sarcastic?

It's more a question of why I can't be trusted to do it myself. Cars are not limited (in the UK) to 70mph, although you should not ever be driving that fast. We can go to a supermarket and buy 7 litres of vodka, yet we are trusted that we won't down it all in half an hour. Not to mention that anyone who is hard of hearing might need high volume players in order to hear them at all...

But mainly I dislike being told what to do. I educate myself, then limit myself based on those recommendations. I don't believe in having my life limited according to what others say I should or should not be able to do to myself.

But you can't buy more than 16 Paracetamol at any one time in Tesco

Because different pairs of headphones have different levels of impedence. So with the volume control on the device set to the same level, you can end up with a vast range of volumes coming out of the headphones. In my case, anything below about 3/4 volume is pretty pointless, simply because they have a higher impedence.