Video gamers worldwide may be risking irreversible hearing loss and/or tinnitus—persistent ringing/buzzing in the ears—finds a systematic review of the available evidence, published in the open access journal BMJ Public Health.

What evidence there is suggests that the sound levels reported in studies of more than 50,000 people often near, or exceed, permissible safe limits, conclude the researchers.

And given the popularity of these games, greater public health efforts are needed to raise awareness of the potential risks, they urge.

While headphones, earbuds, and music venues have been recognized as sources of potentially unsafe sound levels, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects of video games, including e-sports, on hearing loss, say the researchers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] darthelmet@lemmy.world 30 points 9 months ago (13 children)

Every time I open a new game, the volume is set to the absolute max, which is orders of magnitude louder than any other sound on my computer. When I go to change the sound settings, I usually have to put the slider comically low before it gets to an acceptable volume range. At that point fine tuning it becomes kind of difficult.

Seriously, why can’t most games get volume right?

[–] Some_Dumb_Goat@pawb.social 3 points 9 months ago

On my last pair of headphones I had to set windows to like 2% until I eventually downloaded equalizer apo and set it to make everything like -20db

load more comments (12 replies)