Logitech’s Loud Enough headphones worth the price to protect your kid’s ears

Although it was news to me, this week is Hearing Awareness Week and it brings up an important topic about noise volume. Now that you’ve given your kids an iPod or equivalent, you should protect them from themselves by keeping them from listening at damaging volumes. And you know you can’t trust them to regulate themselves. They can’t even remember to eat on a regular basis.

Permanent hearing damage begins at 80 decibels and MP3 players go to a maximum of around 120 and more than 40% of them on the market go over 100dB. Hearing experts recommend the 60/60 rule to protect your hearing - listening to your personal music device for a maximum 60 minutes at 60% of the volume. The Loud Enough headphones reduce the maximum on your player by around 30%. Which should be just about right. And whether you have noticed or not, those earbuds that came with your iPod don’t fit a kid too well and can hurt their ears. The Loud Enough comes with six different sized ear cushions for just the right fit (two each of XS, S, and M) and they come with a nice hard carrying case. No more “Mommy can you wind these up?” Or in our case, “Mom the cat chewed these up”.

The earphones are durable and come in blueberry (blue), mint (green) or plum (fuchsia) with matching color cases. As a bonus the Loud Enough earphones provide up to 16 dBs of noise isolation, not so much that they can’t hear you call them for dinner, or hear the car behind them. The cost is around $40, but it is well worth it to protect them from themselves.