Help a nerd who doesn't get out much, Pt. 2

[prog]

I enjoyed the concert, though it was very loud and the acoustics were terrible.

Twelve hours and a solid sleep later, my ears are still ringing, and I have a physical sensation of cotton lodged into both of them. Is this... should I be worried? I don't know.

A friend who goes to many concerts tells me that, doy, they sell earplugs at the bar,

Comments

pete townshend

[cthulhia]

isn't completely deaf. and everyone said he would be by now.

that said, I may join you for earplugs at the mid-east club because their acoustics suck. I've been to stadium shows (quite a lot this year, oddly) that weren't that loud and didn't give me cotton ear that lasted more than an hour or so.

I hate earplugs with a passion since they feel *weird* and seem to dull out the sound too much (I like treble, or something), but, I may have to grudgingly wear them if I'm seeing more than a concert a week. (This week of JBE, HONK, HONK again, The Residents, and last night's wall of noise rather drove that point home.)

Also, one night of concert isn't nearly as bad as, say, the damage done to your ears when the T pulls into Harvard. If you are truly concerned about your hearing, be sure to protect against that sort of daily damage as well.

Re: pete townshend

[prog]

Nah, I'm not being hypochondriacky about this. I honestly have never had the cotton-ear feeling before, nor have I have tinnitus that lasted more than a few hours, so it freaked me out a little. I'm reassured now that it'll go away. (I use the "nerd" subject header because I assume that if I had a more outgoing youth, I'd have known all this as common knowledge by now.)

Re: pete townshend

[radtea]

Subway trains are about 100 dBA (decibels weighted to human ear response). Concerts (rear seats) are 110 dBA, which thanks to the logarithmic goodness of decibels comes out to a factor of two higher.

Assume train noise lasts 5 seconds. So if you take the train twice a day, 250 days a year, you'll accumulate 20 minutes of exposure time at an intensity half that of a concert. 40 minutes if it lasts 10 seconds, assuming that that full 10 seconds is at the peak intensity, which it isn't.

It's worth protecting yourself against high environmental levels. But given the considerably greater hazard of concerts there is nothing inconsistent about protecting against concerts even if you don't worry about trains.

Re: pete townshend

[radtea]

Also, one night of concert isn't nearly as bad as, say, the damage done to your ears when the T pulls into Harvard.

Not so, I'm afraid. Subways are typically 100 dbA, concerts 110 dbA, or more if you're near the stage/speakers. That's a factor of two difference, and train noise only lasts ten seconds or so, so even a regular rider would take a couple of years to accumulate two hours of exposure to much lower sound levels than one gets in a single concert. Don't take my word for it--the data are just a google away.

I don't like earplugs either--they do seem to kill the high frequencies more than the low, and as my audiogram looks like a ski-slope I miss the high frequencies a lot. But I'd miss hearing at all a lot more.

Re: pete townshend

[dougo]

Pete Townshend - "I have severe hearing damage. It's manifested itself as tinnitus, ringing in the ears at frequencies that I play guitar. It hurts, it's painful, and it's frustrating."

At stadium shows you're nowhere near as close to the speakers as at the tiny Middle East upstairs (unless you're in the front row, and even then maybe not).

Earplugs take some getting used to, but by the third or fourth time I wore them it felt like I wasn't wearing them at all, except that my ears didn't ring afterward. It's a taste worth acquiring, if you go to more than two or three shows a year.