RevMen
New Head-Fier
Last Week I attended a workshop to become a certified Dangerous Decibels instructor. It's a program designed to get the idea of hearing protection into the minds of kids before high school cynicism sets in. It's a worthwhile goal, as we are in the beginning stages of a hearing loss epidemic, with something like 20% of kids ages 12 to 19 showing significant hearing loss.
Anyway, one of the things they showed us was the invention of a student named Genna Martin. The invention is called Jolene. The short of it is she modified a mannequin head to allow for a pretty accurate measurement of in-ear SPL produced by earbuds and headphones using inexpensive parts.
http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/jolene/
The purpose of Jolene is to alert young people to the fact that they're listening at literally dangerous levels. They set it up in a busy place, like an outdoor mall, and wait for people to come up. The unusual sight of a strangely dressed mannequin torso gets peoples attention easily enough. The person running the display asks the passerby to turn on their iPod (or whatever) to their normal listening level, then they put the earbud/earphone on Jolene to see what the actual level is. Dozens of Jolenes have been created all over the world (they're not all named Jolene).
And this is a great thing. But it could also be useful for people here who are interested in a repeatable and fairly inexpensive way of measuring in-ear SPL. The Jolene Cookbook is free to download and spells out the creation of your own Jolene in great detail. It uses a cheap Radio Shack SLM, which is plenty accurate enough for these purposes. Of course you don't need an entire mannequin, just a "head" of some kind would be sufficient.
Anyway, one of the things they showed us was the invention of a student named Genna Martin. The invention is called Jolene. The short of it is she modified a mannequin head to allow for a pretty accurate measurement of in-ear SPL produced by earbuds and headphones using inexpensive parts.
http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/jolene/
The purpose of Jolene is to alert young people to the fact that they're listening at literally dangerous levels. They set it up in a busy place, like an outdoor mall, and wait for people to come up. The unusual sight of a strangely dressed mannequin torso gets peoples attention easily enough. The person running the display asks the passerby to turn on their iPod (or whatever) to their normal listening level, then they put the earbud/earphone on Jolene to see what the actual level is. Dozens of Jolenes have been created all over the world (they're not all named Jolene).
And this is a great thing. But it could also be useful for people here who are interested in a repeatable and fairly inexpensive way of measuring in-ear SPL. The Jolene Cookbook is free to download and spells out the creation of your own Jolene in great detail. It uses a cheap Radio Shack SLM, which is plenty accurate enough for these purposes. Of course you don't need an entire mannequin, just a "head" of some kind would be sufficient.