[BiggerHead]

   
 Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean you will avoid noise induced hearing damage because that type of hearing damage is caused by sound pressure not by loudness. But hey, they're your ears and you can believe whatever you want and damage them however much you want.
 
G

 
from http://american-hearing.org/disorders/noise-induced-hearing-loss/
 
"An example of a noise induced hearing loss is shown in Figure 1. There is a “notch” at 3000 Hz, with better hearing at both lower and higher frequencies. When noise is too loud, it begins to kill cells in the inner ear. As the exposure time to loud noise increases, more and more hair cells are destroyed. As the number of hair cells decreases, so does your hearing. Currently, there is no way to restore life to dead hair cells; the damage is permanent."
 
I'll admit, I have no idea how credible this source is, just the first thing google turned up.  Seems to me it's talking about "loudness" though.

 

[WCDchee]

I suppose my reservation would be the implication that other IEM/CIEM damage hearing even if used sensibly.

The 64 ciems, the new range (A series) especially sounds great, much better than the previous range. Whether I think it justifies the price hike is a separate issue (I don't think it does but that's for another place and time).

Now with regards to the ADEL module, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it changes the sound. This can clearly be seen in the sound changed with the self adjustable module. Whether it's "better" per SE, I won't say; but it is different.

What I am contesting though are the claims of hearing protection. I'v carefully thought about and examined the claims, discussed this with various ENT Doctors and with the information presented and the current evidence based understanding of hearing medically, the claims cannot really be properly rationalists.

Now I am not saying that it cannot possibly protect our hearing, but the ADEL guys have to explain it with clearly defined and quantified terms. Terms like listening fatigue, pneumatic pressure (especially when excess pressure in the ear will be equalised by the eustachian tube within reason, how pressure on the eardrums cause hearing loss (which by current physiological understanding of hearing doesn't quite make sense).

If they are able to explain these things, I will be happy to accept their claims

 

[castleofargh]

skepticism is the logical starting point when we lack enough information/evidence. I'll never criticize someone for having doubts. I guess Brooko's point is about how it's voiced and not about it being voiced.
is the tech totally pointless? can it help in some cases? does it help for everybody under any circumstances? those are 3 very different situations. so far the pro side of things never made claims that exceeded the "it can help in some cases". somewhere they even mention a band having the need for isolation to perform, so that they can't have the luxury of open design. even if the ADEL was really interesting only for particular situations like this, that would already put them apart from the snake oil stuff.
 
I have changed my understanding of the ADEL thing 3 times already and I'm still not totally sure I have it right this time around(at first I thought the relief valve was only for the inserting/removing pressure ^_^), so while I really am not sold on the tech, I also very much lack evidence that it cannot do any good compared to a sealed IEM with the same frequency response.
and I find some of the ideas interesting enough to make me curious.
I insist, skepticism should be the default position for anything unclear. but IMO, saying something is useless requires just as much evidence as saying it's not.

 

[BiggerHead]

WCD, I think you are interpretting "pnematic" to mean "constant", "static" or at least very slowly changing?  I don't think it's even clear that everyone means this.  Some just seem to think that the "direct" pushing of the speaker on the ear drum by way of the air in the enclosed space, at a frequency of even say 50 hz, equals "pneumatic" and is somehow different from any other pressure at 50hz.  I think most don't seem to realize that even a 3khz sound wave is HUGE compared to the spaces in the ear, and so pretty much all sound would be "pneumatic" by this understanding.  
 
I would tend to be fine with your understanding of the word, and I'd agree with your skepticism of hear loss effects from that, but the vagueness leads to these other implications that I'm not at all fine with. 

 

[BiggerHead]

Castle I agree.  There is a gap though between useful "this is a great headphone with a sound signature and clarity for enjoyable listening at low volume" and a sales pitch about wiz-bang ear saving tech to hype the price a little more.  Where in the spectrum this falls is not clear.

 

[Brooko]

BH - did you read this one - http://document.li/9d9S/
 
Its by no means conclusive - but seems to suggest something is really there with regard to perceived loudness vs actual spl with the same earphones (except one has an active membrane)
 
Also the bit they're talking about (and calling pneumatic pressure) relates to this PDF - http://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/03/31/asius-ica-paper-montreal2013/asius-ica-paper-montreal2013.pdf
 
And I'm sorry if you think I'm emotional - I'm not.  I'm just very interested in actually learning about this.  You suggested the pressure suggestion was bunk, and no explanation why.  Can you explain why it can't possibly happen like they are suggesting.  All I want to be able to do is actually understand what is happening.  And what I'm reading in the papers sounds plausible.

 

[BiggerHead]

Hi Brooko.
 
I have seen it.  I haven't read all of it yet.  Page 7 does seem to imply that in the end, what they have is an iem with a reduced bass response.  Some hole somewhere might be a way to get that.  Do no other iems have weak bass though?  I still think they're spinning words here a bunch. It just wouldn't sound as hot if they just said they found and designed an iem with a frequency curve that promotes lower listening volumes.  It's especially bad if the beats crowd gets wind of the fact that this means less bass!

 

[WCDchee]

WCD, I think you are interpretting "pnematic" to mean "constant", "static" or at least very slowly changing?  I don't think it's even clear that everyone means this.  Some just seem to think that the "direct" pushing of the speaker on the ear drum by way of the air in the enclosed space, at a frequency of even say 50 hz, equals "pneumatic" and is somehow different from any other pressure at 50hz.  I think most don't seem to realize that even a 3khz sound wave is HUGE compared to the spaces in the ear, and so pretty much all sound would be "pneumatic" by this understanding.  

I would tend to be fine with your understanding of the word, and I'd agree with your skepticism of hear loss effects from that, but the vagueness leads to these other implications that I'm not at all fine with. 

Actually, you misunderstand me. What I'm saying, is precisely that nobody knows what I'm the world this pneumatic pressure is. We can all assume, but really talking about wavelengths and the relative length of the eardrum to it is not really important as a wavelength actually doesn't require a space larger than it to form.

But yes, I never attempted to define what a pneumatic pressure is, in fact if you go back and read my older posts, you'll realise that this is one of my biggest gripes with the whole claim of the ADEL, most of the ADEL tech is based of pneumatic pressures in their explanations, when the term pneumatic pressure isn't even properly defined anywhere. A quick search wouldn't really yield any results.

 

[Brooko]

I agree if its just the bass then its a play on words, but the interesting thing was that overwhelmingly the test subjects all indicated their perception of equal loudness - and it revealed a lower SPL with the Adel module intact.  They used tones as well as music, and the difference was significant 3.5-9 dB.
 
In the other paper as well - and you may have missed this - the proposition is that in an enclosed environment the sound waves are reflected in the ear cavity, and then work against each other to build sound pressure (they call it Trapped Volume Insertion Gain). And again it appears to be measurable, and a phenomena that others have also recorded - although no-one else so far seems to have made the same leap as far as cause / effect / solution goes.  That's what the guys at Stanford were modelling for him I think. 

 

[BiggerHead]

But now I've read a little more of it again.  Yep, definitely a proceedings article.  The way they just drop in the "preliminary" data on page 8 with no description of how it was taken, and then the article just ends.    No indication of the number of data points, blindness etc. The "conclusion" is done as poorly as the introduction was.  This doesn't look anything like a scientific publication normally looks.  It doesn't look to me like stuff that could get beyond a proceedings report as then written (2013).  Again that doesn't prove it's all bad, and I'm not saying that.  But it also doesn't prove it's a revolutionary discovery worthy of scientific publication.

 

[Brooko]

Actually, you misunderstand me. What I'm saying, is precisely that nobody knows what I'm the world this pneumatic pressure is. We can all assume, but really talking about wavelengths and the relative length of the eardrum to it is not really important as a wavelength actually doesn't require a space larger than it to form.

But yes, I never attempted to define what a pneumatic pressure is, in fact if you go back and read my older posts, you'll realise that this is one of my biggest gripes with the whole claim of the ADEL, most of the ADEL tech is based of pneumatic pressures in their explanations, when the term pneumatic pressure isn't even properly defined anywhere. A quick search wouldn't really yield any results.

 
I think the issue is that they refer to it in their papers as the TVIG I referred to above.  When you look at the actual papers itself, it seems as though it is both measurable and plausible.

 

[Brooko]

  But now I've read a little more of it again.  Yep, definitely a proceedings article.  The way they just drop in the "preliminary" data on page 8 with no description of how it was taken, and then the article just ends.    No indication of the number of data points, blindness etc. The "conclusion" is done as poorly as the introduction was.  This doesn't look anything like a scientific publication normally looks.  It doesn't look to me like stuff that could get beyond a proceedings report as then written (2013).  Again that doesn't prove it's all bad, and I'm not saying that.  But it also doesn't prove it's a revolutionary discovery worthy of scientific publication.

 
Agree - but would you say based on what you have seen/read that it is worth investigating further (with a healthy dose of scepticism CoA mentioned earlier)?

 

[BiggerHead]

Actually, you misunderstand me. What I'm saying, is precisely that nobody knows what I'm the world this pneumatic pressure is. We can all assume, but really talking about wavelengths and the relative length of the eardrum to it is not really important as a wavelength actually doesn't require a space larger than it to form.

But yes, I never attempted to define what a pneumatic pressure is, in fact if you go back and read my older posts, you'll realise that this is one of my biggest gripes with the whole claim of the ADEL, most of the ADEL tech is based of pneumatic pressures in their explanations, when the term pneumatic pressure isn't even properly defined anywhere. A quick search wouldn't really yield any results.

 Well I may have mis-interpreted some sentence, but I think we exactly agree on that.

 

[BiggerHead]

   
Agree - but would you say based on what you have seen/read that it is worth investigating further (with a healthy dose of scepticism CoA mentioned earlier)?

 
Personally, I'll finish reading the article, probably soon.  I won't buy them, but I really use only very cheap iems, just for convenience, and not much for music even at that.  I have thought of getting some good ones for air travel sometime though.

 

[Brooko]

Hate to say it - but f you have regular air travel, get yourself a pair of Bose QC25's.  Ultra comfortable, and for air travel (I do a lot), thoroughly outclasses even my best IEMs on long hauls. ANC is brilliant.