DaveLaPorte53
Well-known Member
I like to feel the music, and there’s more to feel with Quad
It seems to be universal. When you hear a great tune, you want to CRANK IT UP! I listen a lot in the car, and many times I've gone somewhere, parked, done my thing then got back in the car and the tunes come on and they're blasting and I think "Man, that was loud", but when I got out of the car it didn't seem that way to me. No wonder why I can't hear like I used to.
But really, all through my years most everyone I've known has loved to crank up their tunes. It's the same music, the same song, but why does it sound so much better LOUD? And why does it turn out that it's not good for you. Another one of life's little bite backs!
Comments?
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Yea like live fireworks. Recent shows I've seen have been a little uncomfortable to my ears.Also watch infrasonic sound (below 15 Hz). It can be very painful for some people.
That's the smartest thing I've ever read and makes such perfect sense. I am 21 and 17KHz will register with me, but it's quieter than 16KHz or 15KHz - have I screwed my hearing up?Cheese and crackers, folks. Facts matter. : - )
Feelings are subjective, but at the same time still relevant. Let's inject a little Science into the discussion.
Google the "Fletcher Munson" curve. Your hearing (and air, the liquid medium sound travels in-it, through evolution-shaped the way our ears evolved) is rolled off at both extremes (a "frowny face" on a graphic EQ) and is most sensitive (until you kill it by listening at 165dB for decades on end) at the center frequency range of around 1Khz. That's the neighborhood in which the Human voice resides. (It's also why most folks who have EQ's will default to the "smiley face" settings.) The more you turn the volume up, the more of the extremes (resultant harmonics in the natural series for highs) and subharmonics (the fundamentals upon which all Western Music is based) become more easily perceptible. Midrange is the easiest to reproduce (as evidenced in whizzer cone/transistor radio speakers) but it's also where our ears hear the lack of "whizzer cone" accuracy the most easily. Midrange isn't "hard" to create, it's just hard to create accurately because our ears will hear "bad things" when they "squawk". (Horns are particularly bad about this.) But highs and lows both are harder to hear and harder to create outright. If you don't get the middle right, listener fatigue gets to be "a thing" relatively quickly. But without clean extended highs (and lows) it lacks immediacy and visceral impact. None of its unimportant, but the bottom octave is the most expensive to get right and that pretty much requires dedicated subwoofers (STEREO pairs, no thanks to 80s disinformation marketing). Above about 10Khz, fundamentals become increasingly hard to hear. But if you take care of your hearing you should still be able to discern 16Khz as a pitch (or at least a tickle) in your ears. Those old enough to remember 17Khz squealing of CRT TV flyback transformers know what I'm talking about. As a kid, I used to hear certain pre-PIR detector department security systems in department stores squeal in ways that if you turned your head, your head would go in and out of phase with your physical location in the store. If you moved it would come and go. These things are "old hat" to Musicians (I'm a retired Musician/Teacher), and a little less "intuitive" to non-Musicians. But compression and other issues aren't as "insidious" to Music as the larger phenomenon that all Music is being relegated to "auditory wallpaper" status. People are no longer sitting and focusing on a recorded performance (with real dynamics LOUD and soft) because they no longer have time to dedicate to that "intellectual" (but NOT passive, it's just physically passive) pursuit. We are the keepers of that tradition. Loud isn't good just because it's loud. The Human nervous system CRAVES diversity of stimulus. The same thing repetitively inflicted on the Human Nervous system will cause our nervous system to "null it out" over time. True for smells (nose-blindness), true for visual stimulus (too many examples to cite here), and definitely true for hearing. It's not Rocket Science unless you dig into it, and then it can be. But most of us have the intuition to figure out we know why it's the way it is, just from our "life experience". Have a great weekend, everybody...
That's the smartest thing I've ever read and makes such perfect sense. I am 21 and 17KHz will register with me, but it's quieter than 16KHz or 15KHz - have I screwed my hearing up?
Thanks for the enlightenment, though. This will probably inform a lot of listening decisions going forward for me!
I like how you spell “difficiency” like “defecate;” gave me a chuckle(not that there’s anything really funny about a hearing difficiency).I had my ear check and cleaning two weeks ago. I do that annually and next week I get my annual hearing test, will be my 3rd one and pretty sure my baseline is established, with the high frequency hearing loss.
I have tinitus in my right ear, high pitch sound, my doctor says it is the brain trying to compensate one ears defeciantcie compared to the other which causes the ringing sound.
I have years of loud music behind me, but I think even more harmful was the daily construction hearing abuse.
After reading this thread I think I will at least ask the question next week of hearing aid.
I actually don't have a problem hearing, I hear pretty good, but the ringing in my right ear I don't like.
I have a little ear plug carrier on my key chain that i can use at will in case I forget.
I like how you spell “difficiency” like “defecate;” gave me a chuckle(not that there’s anything really funny about a hearing difficiency).
Your usual audiologist is only concerned that you can hear in the speech related frequencies which, of course, is a much lower bar compared to the frequency range for music. You don’t appear to have any trouble with listening to speech.
Tinnitus is neurologic and, unfortunately, there’s not a lot that can be done for that.
My wife would probably be happy if I had my ears cleaned out everyday.
Absolutely Derek, and good to hear from you.One thing to watch out for is hyperacusis. If you accidentally clang a cup and a plate together or something like that that causes a particular frequency to jump out at a certain volume and it hurts your ears, then that could hyperacusis. I can't say for sure whether I have it but anytime I'm doing the dishes and plates clang together it seems to send a shooting pain into my ears, especially, I think, my left ear. There are other things that can trigger it, like hearing a high-pitched blast from an oboe or worse, a piccolo.
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