Thanks.
I like to listen to music quite loud, and enjoy concerts, but to my knowledge, I can still hear perfectly.
However, I have mild PDD, and I often “space out” when people are talking to me – I just sort of (involuntarily) retreat into my own thoughts, and though I physically hear what is being said to me, it is processed the way a foreign language you don’t speak is processed – as sounds without meaning. I get crap pretty often from people who think I must have damaged my ears by listening to loud music, since I have to ask them to repeat themselves when they talk to me, when I really did hear them – my brain just wasn’t interpreting their words as English.
My dad has a pretty bad level of hearing loss, but it’s from working around loud machines at work. He always manages to hear the most amusingly incorrect variant on what you said, too…
A very salient and worthwhile observation my friend.
If I may, I’d like to attempt to explain why the phenomona you’ve observed is true. Firstly, a brief history lesson on concert speakers and amplification…
Anyone ever seen footage of The Beatles at their famous Shea Stadium concert in 1964? Take a close look at their amplification setup. None of the guitar amps were mic’d up, and Ringo had just two mics for his entire drum kit. Either side of the stage were two vertical racks per side which featured just 4 x 8" speakers per rack for the vocals and drum kit. That was it… that tiny little bit of hardware was supposed to provide the amplification necessary to fill an entire stadium filled with 55,000 screaming teenagers. Yeah right…
By 1969 the Rolling Stones discovered that “touring equipment” had made huge leaps forward, and their North American tour that year (with the exception of Altamont) set a benchmark as the “professional sound system”.
By 1974 the Guinness Book of World Records listed the loudest ever concert of all time as being a concert by The Who at Wembley Stadium as peaking at 115db at 100 meters from the stage. Lord fucken knows what the World Record is now…
My point, however, is this… the onward march of technology in the field of stage amps and amplification has been relentless - every 5 years the capacity to make a sound system louder than ever before (with even less distortion) has come around like a regular visit by some celestial body. And it’s true for every imaginable environment - from restuarants to bars to nightclubs to rave parties to indoor concerts and then onto outdoor concerts. Universally, across the board, they’re louder than they’ve ever been before - by many, many orders of magnitude. The only exception to this tends to be outdoor concerts where local council places peak limiting regulations on promoters.
Hence, what happens now is that even a mid level band has a touring sound system that would have blown that 1969 Rolling Stones soundsytem into the outer reaches of deep space. And they are incredibly piercing - right across the audible hearing range.
Accordingly, what happens when you wear earplugs - especially those wonderful foam collapsable ear plugs that racing drivers like to use - well what happens is that the listener actually brings BACK the dynamic range of the sound system’s output back to an acceptable, healthy level. And most remarkably, high frequencies in particular are brought back into manageable, deciperable levels.
It says a lot, an awful lot, about the guys who do sound mixing. 100% of the time, if I see a guy doing the mixing without earplugs I can guarantee you the mix is gonna be way, way beyond healthy levels - and often, it’s gonna be a godawful shit mix too.
In short, the human ear is extraordinarily sensitive - we can detect volume differences as subtle as 1 millionth of 85db of sound. The assertion that rock music has to be turned up loud to hearing impariment levels, just so it can be enjoyed, is a fallacy. It’s a self serving fallacy used by folks to justify the fact that they have never been taught to truly appreciate what human hearing is, and how it works.
I won’t even start on how digital music has ruined music these past 8 years through chronic overabuse of limiting and multi-band compressors. The relentless persuit of the “perception that louder is better” is just plain ruining modern music if you ask me. Modern albums universally sound like dogshit - just ask Dave Grohl how pissed of he was with his last album’s “final sound” after RCA sent it to final mastering without his permission.
I’m 46.
The Walkman was NEVER loud enough for me.
I thank god every day for the invention of closed captions.
Enough said?