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I'm 42 years old and spent much of my teens and early 20s going to loud rock shows, raves, etc. I was rather stupid and always tried to get right up to the PA

I'm 42 years old and spent much of my teens and early 20s going to loud rock shows, raves, etc. I was rather stupid and always tried to get right up to the PA speakers at the front. I did not wear hearing protection. Many times I left shows with ringing for hours and that feeling like there is cotton stuffed in your ears for days. Not a handle of times - dozens of times. By my mid 20s it appeared I had tinnitus around the 8k area, which really freaked me out and immediately caused me to change my habits. Also around this time I got into headphone audio in a big way. I got an SPL meter and made sure to never go above 85dBs for extended listening sessions. By my mid 30s the tinnitus had dissipated considerably. Now it's effectively gone, at least that I can tell (ie. not aware if there is psychological compensation happening). My hearing is great too, right ear at 17.5 kHz, left ear at 16.9. http://www.electronicbeats.net/can-we-cure-tinnitus-by-listening-to-music-or-using-an-app/ http://www.electronicbeats.net/can-we-cure-tinnitus-by-liste...

biggieshellz 9y ago
FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz (noise notch). You generally lose the really high frequencies (20 KHz on down) due to presbycusis, hearing loss due to aging. Even if you can still hear the really high frequencies, you could still have a noise notch around 4 KHz. If you haven't already, go get an an audiogram. It's cheap (<$100) and will give you a baseline on how your hearing is.
- louprado 9y ago
  > FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz I used http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ to quickly profile my hearing and found significant loss around 4.0kHz. I have ridden a motorcycle most of my life and it is much worse in the ear that is on the same side as the exhaust. I am not sure what a spectrogram looks like for a motorcycle but I would have assumed that most of the energy is in the lower end of the spectrum, given the steady cruising RPS is around 40Hz-70Hz. But, your comment seems to suggest that there is not a direct correlation between the frequency of the noise exposure and the hearing loss frequencies.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    Wind noise is at least as loud as engine noise at least at highway speeds. While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise. As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears. (These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )
    - lbotos 9y ago
      Do you feel "less connected" to the world when you are riding with earplugs in? Does it make it feel more dangerous you might be less aware? It makes sense to wear the plugs, but I've never heard of a street rider doing it.
      - bigiain 9y ago
        Definitely does not feel less safe. Plugs don't "disconnect" you, they just take all the sound down a few notches. The exhaust noise, wind noise, and other traffic noises are all still there, just not so loud and insistent. I'm completely convinced that they make me safer on long rides, because you arrive significantly less tired - works great on planes too, I won't fly without earplugs any more.
  - thenickdude 9y ago
    While trying this tone generator out, I thought I had a ridiculous notch in my hearing at 532Hz, because the perceived volume dropped to about 10-20% of the neighbouring frequencies. But then I moved my head slightly to the side, and the normal volume was restored! Turns out that I had inadvertently replicated a classic high-school "constructive/destructive interference" demonstration. Driving the pair of speakers on my desk at that frequency put the position of my head in one of the destructive-interference "nulls" where the effective volume approaches zero. So if anyone else is playing around with it, be sure to use headphones instead of stereo speakers!
- nylonstrung 9y ago
  I'm mid 20s and my hearing is pretty much perfectly cut off at 11 khz but is fine below. I've had tinnitus since youth and have had lots of exposure to loud music but it hasn't gotten tremendously worse overtime and doctors either wave it away or say it's from noise induced hearing loss, which seems at odds with the 4 khz thing I've heard from you and others. Any perspective on what the deal with that would be? I haven't ever used an ototoxic medicine or anything
imdsm 9y ago
Interestingly, when I was about 16 I was at a friend's gig in a pub. I hadn't gone to many before and haven't been to many since, but on this particular occasion I was stood talking with friends near the stage with my left ear directly next to the speaker cabs. I wasn't aware of the activity behind me, but the opening band had come on to do a sound check, and being heavy metal, it was basically just a mechanical, metallic sound, 30 cm away from my ears at max volume. Here is what is funny though, the wavelength at which my hearing "kazoos" is the wavelength at which my young son cries. So while he was a baby, and even sometimes now as a toddler, if he's upset and I'm holding him, it's gotta be my right shoulder, otherwise my left ear bugs. It's a strange feeling too, a mixture of pain and grinding and broken audio that really sets me on edge. Peculiar.
dvtv75 9y ago
I'm 43 years old, and in my 20s I went to a few loud rock shows. I had the same experience as you for days afterwards, but at the last one I attended without hearing protection, something funny happened in my right ear. It was like someone turned the tone control right down, and loud noises would distort so badly I couldn't make anything out. A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing. I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped. I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it. edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.
- toothbrush 9y ago
  I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best. Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.
  - projektir 9y ago
    It seems to be in the same bucket as people not wearing seat belts and making fun of you if you ask them to wear one in a car with you. If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.
dag11 9y ago
Wow, this gives me hope. I'm 22 and in the past two years I've gone to ~100 rock concerts, seeing a total of 270 sets. For the first 23 concerts I didn't wear any hearing protection, until I had a scary event with my hearing at a Neon Trees concert that left my hearing very distorted for three days. Then for the next 80 or so concert's I'd wear my hearing protection most–but not all–of the time. In the past year I've had worsening tinnitus. Although now (and for the last ~30 concerts) I've worn ear plugs most of the time (and recently bought molded ear plugs), the tinnitus still gives me great anxiety when I hear it in quiet places like my bedroom at night. The permanency of it is what freaks me out the most. But your comment gives me hope that I'll one day be able to enjoy silence again. I fully urge anyone who goes to rock and similar concerts with any frequency at all to wear hearing protection. I'm a fan of Earasers and custom-molded musicians ear plugs. Even if you don't care about your hearing now, once you do care, it'll often be too late.
- et1337 9y ago
  I've had pretty bad tinnitus my whole life. In a perfectly quiet room it sounds deafeningly loud. I use a pink noise app in bed at night, but otherwise it doesn't really bother me. Point is, don't worry about it, your brain can adjust to anything and you'll be fine. As I understand it, tinnitus is only half physical damage anyway. The other half is neural. In my case I believe it's all neural. At one point it got way worse for about a month, likely caused by stress. Freaked me out to the point of briefly having suicidal thoughts. Then I got used to it again. TLDR try not to be anxious about it. Good luck :)
  - tptacek 9y ago
    In my experience blood pressure and sinus inflammation (the symptoms of which can be pretty subtle) can both jack up chronic tinnitus.
- mgleason_3 9y ago
  Wow, are you in the business or just a huge fan?
  - 9y ago
pmarreck 9y ago
Is there a way to test your own hearing online, I wonder? with headphones?
chrisdsaldivar 9y ago
How are you using an SPL meter to measure headphone audio? I've always been kinda worried about hearing damage.

biggieshellz 9y ago

FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz (noise notch). You generally lose the really high frequencies (20 KHz on down) due to presbycusis, hearing loss due to aging. Even if you can still hear the really high frequencies, you could still have a noise notch around 4 KHz. If you haven't already, go get an an audiogram. It's cheap (<$100) and will give you a baseline on how your hearing is.

louprado 9y ago
> FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz I used http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ to quickly profile my hearing and found significant loss around 4.0kHz. I have ridden a motorcycle most of my life and it is much worse in the ear that is on the same side as the exhaust. I am not sure what a spectrogram looks like for a motorcycle but I would have assumed that most of the energy is in the lower end of the spectrum, given the steady cruising RPS is around 40Hz-70Hz. But, your comment seems to suggest that there is not a direct correlation between the frequency of the noise exposure and the hearing loss frequencies.
- bigiain 9y ago
  Wind noise is at least as loud as engine noise at least at highway speeds. While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise. As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears. (These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )
  - lbotos 9y ago
    Do you feel "less connected" to the world when you are riding with earplugs in? Does it make it feel more dangerous you might be less aware? It makes sense to wear the plugs, but I've never heard of a street rider doing it.
    - bigiain 9y ago
      Definitely does not feel less safe. Plugs don't "disconnect" you, they just take all the sound down a few notches. The exhaust noise, wind noise, and other traffic noises are all still there, just not so loud and insistent. I'm completely convinced that they make me safer on long rides, because you arrive significantly less tired - works great on planes too, I won't fly without earplugs any more.
- thenickdude 9y ago
  While trying this tone generator out, I thought I had a ridiculous notch in my hearing at 532Hz, because the perceived volume dropped to about 10-20% of the neighbouring frequencies. But then I moved my head slightly to the side, and the normal volume was restored! Turns out that I had inadvertently replicated a classic high-school "constructive/destructive interference" demonstration. Driving the pair of speakers on my desk at that frequency put the position of my head in one of the destructive-interference "nulls" where the effective volume approaches zero. So if anyone else is playing around with it, be sure to use headphones instead of stereo speakers!
nylonstrung 9y ago
I'm mid 20s and my hearing is pretty much perfectly cut off at 11 khz but is fine below. I've had tinnitus since youth and have had lots of exposure to loud music but it hasn't gotten tremendously worse overtime and doctors either wave it away or say it's from noise induced hearing loss, which seems at odds with the 4 khz thing I've heard from you and others. Any perspective on what the deal with that would be? I haven't ever used an ototoxic medicine or anything

imdsm 9y ago

Interestingly, when I was about 16 I was at a friend's gig in a pub. I hadn't gone to many before and haven't been to many since, but on this particular occasion I was stood talking with friends near the stage with my left ear directly next to the speaker cabs. I wasn't aware of the activity behind me, but the opening band had come on to do a sound check, and being heavy metal, it was basically just a mechanical, metallic sound, 30 cm away from my ears at max volume. Here is what is funny though, the wavelength at which my hearing "kazoos" is the wavelength at which my young son cries. So while he was a baby, and even sometimes now as a toddler, if he's upset and I'm holding him, it's gotta be my right shoulder, otherwise my left ear bugs. It's a strange feeling too, a mixture of pain and grinding and broken audio that really sets me on edge. Peculiar.

dvtv75 9y ago

I'm 43 years old, and in my 20s I went to a few loud rock shows. I had the same experience as you for days afterwards, but at the last one I attended without hearing protection, something funny happened in my right ear. It was like someone turned the tone control right down, and loud noises would distort so badly I couldn't make anything out. A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing. I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped. I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it. edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.

toothbrush 9y ago
I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best. Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.
- projektir 9y ago
  It seems to be in the same bucket as people not wearing seat belts and making fun of you if you ask them to wear one in a car with you. If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.

dag11 9y ago

Wow, this gives me hope. I'm 22 and in the past two years I've gone to ~100 rock concerts, seeing a total of 270 sets. For the first 23 concerts I didn't wear any hearing protection, until I had a scary event with my hearing at a Neon Trees concert that left my hearing very distorted for three days. Then for the next 80 or so concert's I'd wear my hearing protection most–but not all–of the time. In the past year I've had worsening tinnitus. Although now (and for the last ~30 concerts) I've worn ear plugs most of the time (and recently bought molded ear plugs), the tinnitus still gives me great anxiety when I hear it in quiet places like my bedroom at night. The permanency of it is what freaks me out the most. But your comment gives me hope that I'll one day be able to enjoy silence again. I fully urge anyone who goes to rock and similar concerts with any frequency at all to wear hearing protection. I'm a fan of Earasers and custom-molded musicians ear plugs. Even if you don't care about your hearing now, once you do care, it'll often be too late.

et1337 9y ago
I've had pretty bad tinnitus my whole life. In a perfectly quiet room it sounds deafeningly loud. I use a pink noise app in bed at night, but otherwise it doesn't really bother me. Point is, don't worry about it, your brain can adjust to anything and you'll be fine. As I understand it, tinnitus is only half physical damage anyway. The other half is neural. In my case I believe it's all neural. At one point it got way worse for about a month, likely caused by stress. Freaked me out to the point of briefly having suicidal thoughts. Then I got used to it again. TLDR try not to be anxious about it. Good luck :)
- tptacek 9y ago
  In my experience blood pressure and sinus inflammation (the symptoms of which can be pretty subtle) can both jack up chronic tinnitus.
mgleason_3 9y ago
Wow, are you in the business or just a huge fan?
- 9y ago

pmarreck 9y ago

Is there a way to test your own hearing online, I wonder? with headphones?

chrisdsaldivar 9y ago

How are you using an SPL meter to measure headphone audio? I've always been kinda worried about hearing damage.