He’s an audiophile, and used to busy himself with an expensive stereo system, constantly tinkering it to alter the sound, and buying loads of expensive parts and cables in the process. He has since cooled off on that, now that he has all his albums on the cloud and a pair of expensive headphones.
However, since he retired, he has now turned his attention to electronic things in the home. First it was his ceiling fan: it “hummed”, though I couldn’t hear it at all. He replaced it five times with different brands of fans, all of which he returned, because they hummed too.
Now it’s the recirculation pump on our water heater. This keeps hot water recirculating so that we have hot water as soon as we turn on the faucet. If we didn’t have it, we’d never get hot water in the kitchen. He said it had started whining, so he has now replaced it twice. He installed the second replacement last night and said it was silent. However, he got up in the night and turned it off, which doesn’t bode well. I foresee another de-installation and replacement.
It’s driving me crazy. I don’t hear the humming or the whining unless I really, really concentrate. Even then, it just doesn’t bug me.
I’m not remotely an audiophile but there are a lot of electronic humming/buzzing sounds that drive me nuts. My husband is a total tech geek so there’s always a quiet war going on: him with the latest fancy gadget, and me turning it off because it hums. We have a gazillion cats so he got a couple of air purifiers. Nope. I cannot stand that noise. We have a water fountain drinking bowl for them, and I go to great lengths to keep it as hum-free as possible. (Drinkwell 360 - it’s actually great). I have two aquariums and am forever fiddling to get the filters to not bug me. I cannot handle air pumps though - that frequency drives me up the wall.
Oddly the sounds of necessary appliances like the fridge, dishwasher (new and amazingly quiet) washer & dryer, and sometimes the old and very NOT quiet HVAC are mostly not annoying and are somehow comforting. I suspect that my brain recognizes them as Good Things and can file them away for me, out of irritation range.
The minute something makes a slightly different noise though puts me on high alert, which has actually come in handy now and then.
A friend of mine was an audiophile. He worked at a high end music place while finishing his PhD, until Jacques Cousteau had him fired.
Cousteau came into the store and my friend waited on him. He wanted a state of the art sound system. My friend should have just sold it to him. Instead, he pointed out that at his age he was wasting money since he couldn’t tell the difference between the equipment he was thinking of buying and a more modestly priced setup.
Jacques was furious. He had my friend fired and swore he’d never work in the field again. Luckily he got his PhD and became a respected neurophysiologist.
I don’t have misophonia, but I have friends who do. Noise canceling headphones (Airpods Pro) help dramatically, since they both isolate sound (through silicon gaskets) and electronically cancel them via waveform inversion. They work especially well against sustained motor hums or electrical whine – any sort of relatively stable, repetitive sound.
I don’t think your hubby is imagining it. Our water recirculator bugs me too, as do squealing fans, just not to a great extent. The ability to detect high frequencies differs between individuals, quite significantly sometimes. Age, history of listening volume, and genetics all have to do with it. You can test it with free phone apps (built in to iPhones now, I think) and also correct it for free with Airpods if desired. l
But in your hubby’s case, it’s not hearing loss but the lack of it, lol. I bet active noise cancelation can help a lot. It’s not a matter of headphone price but whether they have good active cancelation.
We used to have a TV in the bedroom that would, while “off” emit a low hissing noise my wife couldn’t hear. When trying to sleep, I would have to get up, turn the TV on, set the volume to 0, THEN turn it off to not hear it. Wife though I was crazy but it was very real to me. Fortunately, that’s the only such thing that’s haunted me.
(btw, I know that electronics don’t really turn off these days but that’s the only thing to have bothered me in that manner)
I have misophnia/tinnitus combo here. The bathroom fans are a bother, and after they’ve done their job I go around and turn them off, otherwise in my house they’ll be running all day.
I use noise-cancelling headphones while on an airplane and it’s great, but they’re a little unwieldy around the house.
I thought misophonia was more triggered by people audibly chewing and slurping and gulping, but maybe that’s just one aspect of it.
Yeah, he’s not. Like I said, I can hear it if I really really concentrate. But if he doesn’t point it out, my brain relegates it to easily-ignored background noise, like the heater or the refrigerator.
Contrariwise, when we’re in the backyard doing yard work, flocks of teeny little finches will collect in the tops of our silver birches to eat seeds from the birch cones. They peep tiny little peeps like a collection of weensy chicks. I can hear them just fine, but Mr. brown can’t hear them at all.
Now he’s going to replace the second replacement pump with the original pump, which he says made less noise than the other two. KMN.
Unless I don’t understand the correct definition of audiophile, it seems to me that misophonia (which I suffer from) is the opposite. I guess they both involve an obsession with sounds(?)
My misophonia is triggered mostly by peoples’ voices.
There’s an actor in a series I just binged whose voice hurts my brain. Thank goodness he was only in one season and it’s unlikely I’ll ever run across him in anything else.
Huh. And I thought it was just me. My furnace makes a racket all the time, but it’s old and I know what it is. My Beer fridge makes noise. One of the stereo components hisses if not turned off in the correct order. My TV makes a buzz like Jophiel’s above. None of this bothers me much as I normally always have music going, generally pretty loud and drowns out all the racket.
My mom had some thing plugged into the wall that supposedly kept mice or ants or pests, something at bay. It drove me crazy! (Don’t go there!) I would have to ask her if she honestly didn’t hear that thing.
I have a timer in the house. Got the Hot-Spot hooked up to it, and it allows cycling of the battery. I can hear it “tick-tick-ticking” all day long if no music is on.
Ah, in the good old days when I was 20, I could hear it if someone turned on the TV anywhere in the house (15,750 Hz flyback transformer). Now I have trouble hearing a kitchen timer hanging around my neck. I had to get one that buzzes rather then whistles.
I too have the misophonia/tinnitus combo. I’ve never thought about it before, but maybe people who aren’t bothered by little external noises (e.g. the lip-smacking noises of kissing, on TV) can also ‘cancel out’ their internal tinnitus too.
I wouldn’t say I have misophonia, but like the OP’s husband, I can hear that high-pitched whine that many appliances and other electrified things make, and it bugs me at times. I used to hate working in offices with fluorescent lighting because they often made a high-pitched buzzing sound. Also because I hated the artificial quality of the light, but I guess that would be a touch of photophobia.
Huh.
Mid-dau can hear a mosquito buzzing an acre away.
I call it her Mom ears.
Sometimes I hear her stomping upstairs well before I hear children fussing.
She says, “I heard the punch to little brothers arm, before he yelled”
She’s big on turning things off “I hear too much noisiness, for my comfort”
Not all fans, for instance, seem to hit the same frequencies. I don’t have bathroom fans (I have windows) but I occasionally use other bathrooms that do have fans. Some of them I can’t bear to listen to; others are fine. It’s not the volume, it’s the frequency. In some bathrooms you can’t turn the light on without turning on the fan, and there’s no window (or it’s pitch dark out.) I can barely stand to stay in there long enough to take a fast pee.
My refrigerator and washing machine don’t hit a frequency that bothers me. I can hear the electric meter humming if I’m in the bathroom which shares a wall with it, but again the frequency’s OK. I can’t hear my lights or my computer etc. – unless I’ve got my phone on hotspot next to the computer because the regular connection’s gone down, in which case something in the combination of devices makes a quite unpleasant noise; but I can usually shut it up by moving the phone around.
Interesting. I have a fair amount of tinnitus, but mostly I only notice it if I start thinking about it. And I’m not bothered by a lot of external noises, or by people eating – but I am seriously bothered by some noises, like the fans above which hit the wrong frequency, and almost anything that beeps. There are way too many things in the modern world that beep, and I doubt that most of those beeps even are accomplishing anything because with everything beeping how do people even notice any specific beep?
Flourescent lighting appears to convince some relevant portion of me that it’s two in the morning and I ought to be asleep. Being under it too long makes it very hard to stay awake and if I stay there anyway can also cause headaches and bad moods. I usually only hear the lights if something’s starting to go wrong with them – but in the kind of place that has lots of them there almost certainly will be at least one that’s getting noisy, and that makes the problem worse; but the lighting alone will do it.
