19 September 2009

The danger of noise-cancelling earphones

More commonly (and less spectacularly) relevant re vehicular traffic, but still a cautionary tale.
A girl who was killed Thursday walking on railroad tracks in Buffalo likely was wearing noise-canceling headphone buds and might not have heard an approaching Canadian Pacific freight train...

The engineer also told Weinzetl that he tried to stop the train and that he sounded the train's horn and siren, to no avail...

Ads for various headphone products speak of ambient noise-canceling capabilities from 70 to 87.5 percent... A 2006 study by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association found that personal music players could play at levels as high as 125 decibels. Train whistles advertise at a range from 135 to 150 decibels.

1 comment:

  1. Uhm...what about "the danger of walking on rails?" A Darwin Award nominee, to say the least.

    ReplyDelete

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