I don't know if it is the right forum, but I think that my story has to be told somewhere. So here it is.
Once upon a time I was a happy Creative Zen:M 30Gb user and music listener: I could rip my cds with grip, encode them with lame VBR v2 and import them to my 25Gb music collection managed by amarok. The intention was to rip all my cd collection to high-quality mp3. As the necessary Zen space went insufficient, I started thinking of purchasing a 60Gb Zen and sell my good old one. I found at Amazon that the 60Gb Zen had almost the same price as the Portable-Media-Device's market leader iPod, in its 80 Gb version. As the additional 20Gb space was very tempting, I ended up buying the iPod.
Creative Zen song devices present a feature called "Smart Volume". I dont know exactly what this feature does, but I think it performs some kind of normalization of the the overall song volume and some sort of frequency treatment. With this feature, I could reach higher song volumes (70%-80%) without agressing my poor ears. When I bought iPod and started importing and listening my mp3 song collection, I noticed it offered a similar feature called "Sound Check". When activating "sound check", my non-musician ears did not notice any difference. The songs volumes were incredibly high at 50%-60%. So, I decided to listen at low volumes (30%-40%). At the end of three days, listening one hour a day, I had to go hospital with a strong headache and earache. Ear-doctor told me that I had to do an ear rest and avoid noisy places.
After a week of "ear rest", I started investigating why the 30%-40% ipod song Volume could make such a damage. I started to make questions like "Is there a problem with iPod or with my ears?" I chose the first one because I had no problems with my wonderful Zen. I started by installed iTunes in the tiny Windows partition I have in my computer. I made the following tests:
a) Imported some of my mp3 songs with itunes.  Result: "Sound Check" still did not work and volumes kept high at (50%-60%).
b) Ripped some songs with lame CBR 192, 160, and 128 and imported them with itunes. Result: "Sound Check" still did not work and volumes kept high at (50%-60%).
c) Ripped some songs with FAAC q120, q180 and imported with itunes. Result: "Sound Check" still did not work and volumes kept high at (50%-60%).
d) Ripped some songs with itunes AAC CBR 128, 160, 192 and imported them with itunes. Result: "Sound Check" did work and volumes kept very low at (50%-60%) even with "Sound Check" turned-off.
e) Ripped some songs with itunes AAC CBR 128, 160, 192 and imported them with amarok. Result: "Sound Check" did not work and volumes kept high at (50%-60%).
If I am not missing something or have done something wrong, my conclusion with the tests is: there's an evil commercial propaganda about iPod. iPod is a PROPRIETARY media device disguised as a PORTABLE media device when it guarantees your health only if you use Apple Media Tools. In a so called fight against song piracy which I am not part of, my ears were almost destroyed. I just had the luck to have sensible ears. What about the thousands of "non-apple-tools" ipod listeners that does not have this privilege? When they discover, it will be late....

Did you see a few years ago, Apple had to build in a volume limit on ipods distributed in Europe because of legal action taken over hearing damage?

On a more relevant note, there is a normalise script available for Amarok - so get yourself a nice light laptop with a big hard drive and a funky backpack, and ditch the toy players