Originally posted by Qliphah:

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Seriously? I think you pointed out the main flaw in the slaw with your last sentence there.

"The quality of headphones/earphones can also contribute one way or another."

How can a device tell what decibel is coming out of the headphones? There is no possible way to monitor that... hell if I wanted I could splice the 3.5 jack of my phone into the sound system of my cars amplifier and blow that 85db up to about 850db and shatter every window around... all while the phone thinks the volumes set at 60% or w/e.

This just stinks of nanny state, the EU should be ashamed they are spending resources protecting the sweet innocent children ears and not... you know... fixing their economy.

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Well this rule only applies to portable music players, which can control the volume output quite well in most cases. Amplifying of course with something else is a different story.

As for the Nanny State part, well the limit can easily be pushed up in settings, its only put that there because research shows that most people have no idea that the default max volume limits put them at high risk for hearing loss.

Oh and on the European Union economy, the EU is actually fine, the EU is largely based on the single market and shares a lot of the same regulations and standards to make doing business in the market easy across borders. When it comes to economic conditions, that's really up to member states and not the European Union. You can take Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain etc as examples of countries doing badly, but then you have Germany, the Nordics etc. who are doing relatively well. The difference came down to national politics, banking systems of individual states and so on.

Then there's the problem of people thinking the European Union and the Eurozone are the same thing. The Eurozone is a group of 17 countries that are a monetary union, within the EU (that is, they use the same currency, the Euro). The entire "Eurozone Crisis" is largely based on the idea that several Eurozone states are in bad economic conditions and high debt, and that threatens the future of the monetary union, so you have reluctance of the markets to loan to certain Eurozone members. But that is an issue for those 17 countries to deal with.