Originally Posted by
mikexner
Okay seriously 95 is nothing. OSHA sound is 160 I believe in a work place before the need for ear plugs. I could be wrong on that number.
but isn’t it good that gone are the days that we couldn’t hear anything? We actually can hear the announcements?
Without going into the scientific differences between decibels and SPL, the OSHA guidelines says anything more than 85dB(A) over 8 hours can cause damage. Cut the time in half for every increase of 3dB because it's a logarithmic scale. Cell phone microphones do a lot of compression, so they're not accurate at louder volumes, but if we take 95 that's 10 more than 85, so the acceptable time for health at 95dB(A) is somewhere between 1 hour and 30 minutes. 130 and above will immediately be damaging.
Of course all this is a separate scale from actual comfort.
(Source: I used to work as an audio engineer)