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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

It's extremely easy to hurt yourself with audio, it almost feels like cheating. Just regular audio work provides plenty of opportunities to do that. Here's a random note from Supercollider, a platform for audio synthesis [1]:

> CAUTION: macOS system volume doesn’t effectively limit audio applications’ maximum volume. Extra care has to be put in working on this platform, especially with headphones, because programs can produce unexpectedly loud sounds regardless of system volume settings, potentially causing ear damage.

[1]: https://supercollider.github.io/download

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The macOS system volume behaviour is ridiculous. I ... had a really bad time once with puredata. I...it's really unpleasant to remember. I also generally amn't entitled with open source software, but reporting this as an issue to the people at puredata (dsp software), recommending that they put in their own software cap in the pipeline was met with the response that I could always do that myself in my scripts as I'm writing them if I cared about it. For me (as someone who's made audio software), user's physical safety of this avoidable kind must be high priority, and it's more or less unconscionable to leave things like this to chance.

Oh Apple... On the iPhone, using earphones, the volume is limited (afaik because of a EU law). On Mac, none of that is the case. I was in a teams called, tried to make it quiter with the touchbar but accidentally set the volume to 80% (insted of 10-15 where it's usually at). My ears hurt for an hour. Thanks Apple for that useless Touchbar.

I just made a comment elsewhere in this thread regarding the absolutely awful behavior iOS had for 3rd party bluetooth headphone volume until a recent (~18 months or so) update. Every time I connected my Sony headset over bluetooth the system volume would reset to max, sometimes seemingly only after I had hit the play button in spotify. I am fairly certain this actually damaged my hearing after several occurrences of getting up, throwing my headphones on as I walked out the door, and blasting myself with max volume playback by accident. Even now that the issue has been fixed, I habitually check the device volume anytime I connect something on bluetooth. To this day I'm astounded Apple shipped such problematic behavior over the course of repeated iOS updates. I think it was fixed around the time they started to provide feedback about listening volumes in Apple Health.

After such one experience, I've never played with audio while wearing headphones unless there's a physical volume control in the signal chain.

Hearing can be damaged both by high volume and very sudden increases.

It's absurd that there are no safety mechanisms implemented in hardware.

this is when developing audio I have several precautions in place:

1) system volume level pretty down (usually 30%) 2) headphones volume in the middle 3) when testing something really broken I have my headphones not on the ears but on the neck

Shouldn't you do it the other way round? Set software volume to 90% and limit to safe levels with a good old potentiometer to be safe from any software issues?

yes, that's safer way how to do it.

However I use that 30% system volume for my day to day usage. When needed, I can always bring volume up.

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