My iPhone killed my headphones

[PmattF]

A very weird thing happened today -- I was watching a video in iTunes with the headphones at moderate volume (about 3/4 on the slider on the screen). A call came in, and when I accepted it, my friends voice was insanely loud in the headphones -- way, way, painfully louder than the video had been, louder than I realized the headphones could even go.

I immediately turned the volume down, but now there is a definite sort of rattling/crunchy sound in the background in the left ear, triggered I think by high frequencies. If I plug in the headphones from my iPod the sound goes away, so it is definitely in the phones.

I am assuming I won't have any trouble getting them swapped out by Apple (though I won't be surprised if the store does not have them in stock, and I will have to get them from Apple). But it is pretty alarming that this happened, and makes me afraid it could happen again with the replacements.

Has anybody else experienced this, or seen any mention of it anywhere?

 

[terp26]

that has happened to me too ! I havent tried swapping phones yet, but let me know if you are successful. The headphones are not that bad but at anything above a moderate level of volume it crackles or for certain types of songs at low levels.

 

[tony710]

Try turning off 'Sound Check' in the iPod settings. When that was on and hooked to my car stereo the volume was very low. When I turned that off it was a huge difference in volume level.

 

[PmattF]

I was able to exchange the headphones for new ones without any trouble at all this morning at the Apple store. As I suspected, they do not yet have spare iPhone headphones in stock as an individual item, but they found a new pair somewhere (still wrapped up in the original plastic).

I did have the Sound Check turned on when the incident happened -- maybe that was causing the video to play excessively softly, so I had the volume up too high when the call came in? It still seems weird -- the slider in the video playback window was only up about 3/4 when it happened. In any case, I will leave Sound Check off now, and hope for the best.