How to get rid of EU volume limit?

Question

I'm currently resiziding in France, and I want to purchase an iPhone 4S here. But I went to the Apple Store and checked the max volume, which is considerably lower than my USA iPod Nano due to EU volume limits.
Now my question is this
Are there any legitimate ways to get rid of EU volume limit? For example would it get rid of it if I restored the phone's firmware when I'm in USA or any non-EU country due to IP check? Or is the firmware the same all over the world and just checks for the devices serial number to see if it's a EU model so it wouldn't matter?
Jailbreaking does get rid of the volume limit through some SSH trick, but I don't want to jailbreak my iPhone simply to remove the volume cap.
And before someone starts with the entire "Why do you need to remove the cap? Do you want to get deaf?" argument, I'd recommend to try to listen to classical music, especially quiet passages, on a subway, with a EU capped iDevice.

Answer 1

I recently took delivery of a new 160GB iPod Classic, and was shocked at how low the volume is. Impossible to even hear the music above London traffic, it was ridiculous (and my hearing is fine). I was on the verge of returning the thing to Apple as useless, when I discovered a little gadget called the FiiO E1 headphone amplifier. It only costs just over a tenner from Amazon, and it works very well. It plugs into the dock socket, and you then plug your headphones into the FiiO gismo. Bingo! Music that you can actually hear. Strange that the EU is trying to ban musical enjoyment, eh? And annoying, after having forked out a lot of money for the iPod itself, that I then had to buy a peripheral device to make it work properly. And even odder, a 6th Generation iPod Nano that I bought only a year ago had no such problems.
As a footnote, I use Grado headphones, and there seems to be no distortion or degradation of sound using the FiiO device. My advice would be to try one out, as it's so cheap. It has a couple of design irritations, in that you can't lock' the controls, but it's working for me, certainly as an interim solution.