It is scarily easy to reach this level in a public setting. The top volume you can stream via an iPhone is 102 decibels.
But this innocent volume-raising simultaneously raises the level of decibels being shot straight into your ear canal, thus heightening your risk of serious ear damage. No noisy neighbor should be allowed to tear us from a beloved song or funny podcast, after all.
When confronted with loud environments, be they airplanes, subways, coffee shops or even suburban sidewalks, our natural instinct is to up the volume on our earbuds. Ironically, though, my musical safeguards were responsible for an equally disturbing decibel level. When I returned from the bathroom, I put my earbuds back on, and didn’t take them out again until it was time to talk to Customs. It’s a menacing cocktail of sound: engines, wind, air conditioners, terrified babies. At takeoff, planes reach an unholy decibel max of 115, but at cruise control they hover between 85 and 90. The more scientific term for that level of noise? Ninety decibels. My seat was towards the back of the aircraft and behind the engines, where noise reaches its apex, and it sounded like a lawn mower was yelling over a leaf blower in a nightclub. When I took my earbuds off, somewhere off the coast of Greenland and just before a trip to the bathroom, I was rocked by the ferocious volume of the plane, a United commercial airliner. I’d slipped them on right after the gate attendant announced “Group 4 Boarding!” then proceeded to storm through three downloaded playlists on Spotify, watch a couple episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and slip into that pseudo-sleep-state that only occurs up in the stratosphere, when delirious exhaustion wins out over a cramped plastic seat and a blanket thinner than a cocktail napkin, if only for an hour or two. On a recent flight back from the United Kingdom, it took me almost four hours to take off my earbuds.
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