Ah, blessed low-volume

May 9, 2007 8:00 AM

How do I make my iPod quieter?

I have a 5G Video iPod and a pair of Etymotic ER4i 'phones. The combo sounds great, but with a downside. The only comfortable volume setting is one or two ticks above mute, because the 'phones are efficient. On some music even that's verging on too loud. Dialing down the iPod any further usually means silence.

The Ety's sound good and I got them specifically because they block ambient noise effectively. Raising the volume to drown out distractions is not an option. A couple online merchants sell passive attenuators (usually a short run of cable with an inline resistor) but they can worsen the sound and finding a good one sounds like a crapshoot.

So my options seem to be a pair of less efficient 'phones that also double as >20dB earplugs, a reliably good passive attenuator, or an outboard amplifier with a lower volume threshold that plugs into the dock port. Recommendations are welcome. Economical, good-sounding recommendations moreso.

posted by ardgedee to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (7 answers total)

I'm not exactly sure I understand the issue, but it sounds to me like you want iPod Volume Booster. I use it to globally raise the volume on myPod, but it will also globally lower volume. It's a great little program that does one thing very well.
posted by The Bellman at 8:08 AM on May 9, 2007

In iTunes you can adjust the volume of multiple songs by selecting as many as you want and right-clicking (or probably option-click on a Mac) and selecting "Get Info". You'll see a volume slider (it may be on the options tab).

So you could adjust the volume of all your songs down by say, 10%.
posted by justkevin at 8:10 AM on May 9, 2007

The iPod itself can do this - open up the Settings menu and go to Volume Limit, then lower the maximum volume to whatever. It'll rescale the volume bar as necessary.
posted by ZaphodB at 8:14 AM on May 9, 2007

justkevin's solution is probably the one that will work for you but when I got my Shure's I ran into the same problem.

What I did was changed the Volume Limit in the iPod settings to a lower maximum volume which gave me smaller ticks for volume adjustment.
posted by puddpunk at 8:21 AM on May 9, 2007

Response by poster: Sorry for not mentioning initially: The ipod's Volume Limit setting is already at 1/4 available volume, and I'm still listening at one or two ticks above muted. Lowering the limit further will not buy me much variance in audible volume (particularly since the incremental divisions do not seem to remap evenly at the low end), and make spoken-word recordings inaudible without re-setting the Volume Limit.
posted by ardgedee at 10:32 AM on May 9, 2007

There is a slashdot thread on the issue - not much help though.

If you could find out a bit more about how the output circuit works, you might be able to hack it with a bit of soldering, but it would be pretty hard. My first guess is that it uses a digital pot, possibly integrated into some proprietary IC, followed by a power op amp for driving headphones, which is hopefully a separate part. If you could add resistors to load the lines between those two parts, you could lower the volume.

D'oh.. Cancel the first guess.. On the shuffle, the headphone driver is integrated into "the mp3 decoder":

The MP3 decoder, mounted to one board, takes charge of a multitude of functions. Its handles music, including the playing of MP3, AAC and Audible format files. It harbors a USB 2.0 converter, SDRAM for buffering data and a headphone driver.

In ars' dissection of a video ipod, the chip is a Wolfsom WM87588G (and here is confirmation that it is the same chip in the G5), which is probably very similar to the WM8751. Looks like hacking the electronics is a non-starter..

External active amplifier is the most obvious choice. The transformer from a tube headphone amp could passively change the volume without degrading the sound quality. I'm thinking that isn't practical for all kinds of reasons (size, price.. OK, two reasons).
posted by Chuckles at 4:57 PM on May 9, 2007

I don't have an iPod so I can't investigate the Volume Limit situation, but assuming your VL is actually limiting to 25% as it claims, here are two possible causes for your situation:

- phones with extraordinarily low impedance (but I believe all the Ety's are either 16 or 32 Ohms, right? -- that's low but not radically so); and/or

- listening to music that was subjected to very aggressive compression during mastering (especially since it sounds like you have music files with much higher average volume than your spoken word files). Unfortunately this is true of more music every day.

I agree your best bet is to find and carry around an external amp. Which sucks -- but when you look at the amp you can at least think of it as a happy reminder that your hearing will probably stay acute much longer into your life than average.

(This thread is a perfect reminder of the vicious-spiral that both music and portable-music hardware are being engineered for, *and* are actively causing, lower levels of hearing -- and people like you who manage to preserve your hearing are going to be more & more in the minority and therefore less & less served by the hardware.)
posted by allterrainbrain at 5:29 AM on May 10, 2007