Hamburg - After class, Jessica Manks reaches immediately for her MP3 player.
'I just have to hear music all the time,' said the 15-year-old from Braunschweig. Her favourite is hip hop. She also has the earpieces in at home to her mother's exasperation.
'My mother's always saying, 'Not so loud,'' according to Manks, who does not take her very seriously.
A lot of students use their MP3 players like Manks does. More than half her classmates have one of the devices, which can hold thousands of songs in digital format. Many of her classmates do not even turn their players off during class prompting the teacher to threaten to confiscate them.
Young people are now being warned about another issue associated with the players: hearing loss. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) recently warned youths about potential damage to the ears associated with the players. The ASHA said having the volume up too loud and listening for too long are the main causes of hearing loss.
Manufacturers are taking heed. Apple Computer Co. has limited the volume of iPods sold in Europe to 100 decibels. However, that's about the same level of volume close up at a rock concert.
Young ears are not more sensitive than older ears, said Michael Deeg of the German professional association of ear, nose and throat doctors in Neumuenster. But when they listen through the earpieces that accompany the MP3 players, they tend too turn up the volume.
The players can do more than the innovations that preceded them, namely the Walkman, said Deeg.
'In addition they play without distortion, so it's automatically turned up louder,' he said. Young people, therefore, should give their ears regular breaks.
There's another danger that could affect iPod users, according to a group of British physicians. Music is selected on an iPod by turning a small wheel with the thumb.
British physicians recently said this could result in an injury they dubbed 'iPod thumb.' However, Kurt Juergen Schwarz of the Association of German Chiropracters in Berlin said it was 'far- fetched.'
For the thumb there is apparently little danger, but the ears are a different story, even if young people don't believe it.
'I have been listening to music this way for a long time, and I don't have any hearing loss,' said Manks. She has no plans to give up her earpieces in the future. She rejects listening to the radio because too much of the broadcasts are 'news and boring stuff.'
Oliver Perzborn of the Trend Bureau, a Hamburg marketing consultancy, seemed more concerned about 'uncool sound' coming from an MP3 player than hearing loss.
'Whenever there's something new, there's always a broad movement against it,' he said. When comics were new, they were supposed to make readers stupid, he noted. That did little to turn them away.
The fact that people can now take their music with them everywhere without having to take along grinding cassette tapes as well, as was the case with the Walkman is new and more exciting.
Perzborn said anyone without an MP3 player is considered out, and although doctors see it differently, volume is more important for young people than a threat that they could lose their hearing.
'I've got to show who I am,' Perzborn said. 'That's why I play music very loudly over my earpieces.'
That will change possibly when the possibilities of what can be listened to in public also changes.
'With a cell phone, it's already possible to blast the people standing around you on a bus with noise,' Perzborn said. 'And when there is storage capacity like the iPod's possible, perhaps soon the boom boxes of the 1980s will return to the streets.' There won't be any need for earpiece headsets then.
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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