Music has become an indispensable part of our everyday lives. As a result, attention is now being turned toward the idea of an appropriate relationship with sound. This trend gained steam in February 2019 when the WHO sounded the alarm regarding the high risk of hearing loss facing 1.1 billion, or roughly half, of the world’ s youths. This risk emerges as a result of ongoing exposure to high-volume sound, whether through extended music listening sessions using one’ s smartphone or mobile music device or at concert halls, clubs, or sports stadiums. This ongoing exposure can place an excessive burden on one’ s ears and thereby result in hearing loss.
Against this backdrop, an increasing amount of attention is being turned toward the concept of safe listening, which refers to the idea of using appropriate volume levels and breaks to safeguard one’ s hearing when enjoying music via headphones or earphones. The WHO and the International Telecommunication Union have put forward safe listening guidelines that state the recommended safe level for leisure noise to be below 80 decibels (75 decibels for children) for a maximum of 40 hours’ duration in a week. The concept of safe listening is also being promoted in Japan through the educational efforts of SAFE LISTENING.
Yamaha proposed a resolution to this shared global issue with a series of new earphones launched in November 2019.
The most noteworthy feature of these headphones is that they are equipped with Yamaha’ s proprietary Listening Care technology designed to reduce the burden placed on users’ ears. Our ears work in a manner that makes it difficult to hear low- and high-frequency sounds at low volumes, a trait that creates the temptation to raise volume levels and place a greater burden on our ears. Listening Care is a technology designed to help fight this temptation by delivering an ideal sound balance at any volume. Our Listening Care earphone lineup includes the TW-E7A and two other models of truly wireless Bluetooth earphone models as well as the EP-E50A and one other Bluetooth earphone model. These earphones were launched in Japan in December 2019, and we are sequentially rolling out these products on a global scale.