Your volume is probably too high. I'm not talking about the formally defined thresholds for hearing damage, though that is a real problem. If you're flagging any of the volume warnings on your devices, turn down the volume immediately and consistently. Those thresholds are meant to be generous. Normal usage should not ever hit them.
But even if you're under them, your volume is probably still too high. Your perception of volume is relative to background noise, so if the environment significantly changes you should need to change the absolute volume to get the same perceived volume. If it sounds the same without adjustment, it was too loud in the quiet environment and you should have turned it down. Evidently you wouldn't have noticed the difference, and it reduces the risk of minor hearing damage, power consumption, and noise leakage.
It also doesn't matter if it sounds fine to you. You cannot trust your perception.
For example, I used to listen to podcasts walking both through a park and along a busy road. I kept it quiet during the park section because there was barely any sound. But when I hit the road, I never suddenly noticed the sounds of the cars. I noticed that I couldn't understand the podcast anymore and had to turn up my volume several ticks until it sounded like it did before. But my perception after the adjustment was always that my surroundings were an ignorable volume, while the podcast was just audible enough to be enjoyable without straining to hear.
This is because we hear volume logarithmically (i.e. significantly louder sounds only sound somewhat louder), that's why you can hear a pin drop in a quiet room and still enjoy a concert. Your brain adapts, like how you adjust to a dark room.
If you're used to an audio level, you cannot tell if it's too loud. To find the right volume level, turn it all the way down to inaudibility, then slowly back up until you can reasonably hear it. Then turn it down again one tick, because you'll get used to it.
Depending on your volume system, one tick might be five units, or you might want to turn it down by five ticks. You can't trust numeric volume controls either unless they have a decibel scale attached. Higher is louder, but how much louder is entirely up for debate. Most volume controls are logarithmic to align with our perceived hearing, but they aren't consistently scaled/anchored and a rare few will be linear because it was the obvious implementation. You do not know which most of your volume controls are on, and it's not worth the effort to tell anyway because you can't tell your environmental noise levels. That's why you have to use inaudibility relative to the current environment as your guide.
If you do and have normal hearing, you will quickly notice that just about everything is too loud. This is a well documented trend in both music and audio production, and has had knock-on effects in hardware as well. It is a rare day when I have need and reason for more than 50% on any volume control. I turn my music down in the volume mixer because the lowest audio level tick on my devices is too loud for a quiet room. As long as you have devices/apps with multiple layers of volume control, you'll be able to turn it down satisfactorily.
As a courtesy, turn it down whenever you share headphones/earbuds with someone else. You don't know what their noise tolerance is, and if you've been listening for a while you won't be an accurate judge. You can always turn it back up if you both think it's too quiet, but you can cause pain if it's too loud. I literally cannot share earbuds with some of my friends because their preferred volume makes me feel like my ear will explode. Take care of your friends, there's no harm in playing it safe.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Feels nice to set aside an hour for writing again, with nothing to rush to after. Been a while, I've been cutting it close on the last few posts. I should find more time somewhere.
This wasn't even the original post for today, it started as an aside to something else. Might clean that up for tomorrow.
I'm happy. Time to go enjoy it.
- Rew