look after your hearing
I love my music, and I can’t imagine living without sound, so I always protect my hearing. There’s a couple of factors that have helped drive the importance of this home for me:
- I used to study classical percussion and looking after your hearing is a strong recurring theme – because when your ears are your living, protecting them is the only smart thing to do
- I have several friends with hearing impairment, and have seen first hand the difficulties that they face
- Dave has tinnitus – a constant buzzing in his ears – and although not caused by exposure to loud noise, it’s certainly aggravated by it.
That’s why I can’t believe the poor attitude some people have to wearing ear plugs at concerts. We use awesome “ear filters” (so-called because they don’t plug or block out noise, they filter excess decibals out) called Hearos (we have the rock n’ roll version, but there’s others as well for different purposes). They’re cheap – I think we paid about AUD $10 for a pair – washable and resuable, comfortable, and allow us to hear and enjoy every nuance of music except the extra-loud and distorted overtones that would otherwise result in “ringing” after the show. The quality of what we hear through our Hearos is far superior to what we’d hear without ’em.
Apparently the earbuds used with iPods and other portable music devices are really bad for you. Fortunately I don’t generally wear them, I listen to music at home and at work out loud. When I do wear headphones – like when playing PSP on the train – it’s not for very long and not very loud. I was surprised to hear about the problem, although on reflection it makes sense.
I was even more surpised to read a Yahoo News article on Pete Townshend, who says that his hearing damage is directly attributable to wearing headphones in the recording studio. That was a little frightening. I sure hope they come up with a way to effectively “repair” people’s hearing in the next twenty years or so – or there’ll be a lot of people living with degrees of deafness.
Hearos are great – a friend in a band recommended them to me when we were going to see them play every weekend. It’s amazing how clear everything is when you’re wearing them, they don’t muffle the sound at all (which also makes any out-of-tune notes, normally covered by the distortion, painfully obvious). Totally recommended.
One night I didn’t realise how loud the music was until I went up next to the stage to take some photos and everything started vibrating in time with the bass…
I’m doing a science Fair project on hearing decibals around my school.so I came here because I have to have things talking about it.
Yeah, I was reading about this the other day. This is probably just me justifying another extravagent purchase, but the article I read mentioned that the more expensive “ear bud” style were better. This is because they generally have far superior “outside noise” blocking, so you don’t have to turn them up to blasting level in order to not hear the inane mobile phone conversation going on next to you. Works for me 🙂