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Safe headphone volume/ sudden hearing loss /HEADPHONE SAFETY / Volume Measurement
Hello!
A couple weeks ago I bought some Denon AH-GC30 closed back headphones to mix on using Cubasis and TB Morphit on iPhone
I love the headphones, they sound great, I was specifically interested in them because of their bass response which does a great job of rendering sub bass frequencies which I typically find hard to get a feel for with most pairs reference of headphones I have tried
Only one problem~ last the way I was using the headphones caused me to go to the emergency room
(Skip next paragraph if you want to skip the dramatic story and get right to the question)
I was mixing for a few hours on a pretty bass heavy track and when I took the headphones off I noticed immediately that my right ear could not hear bass frequencies~ there was this scary and very obvious sensation like someone literally slapped a highpass filter on my right ear~ this continued for 24 hours before I went to the emergency room to have it looked at (this was a Sunday) because someone on Quora had told me that this qualified as a medical emergency and may require steroids to make the hairs in my ear bend back to normal. The doctors had horribly outdated equipment which I was shocked by as it was a reputable hospital in Berlin, but they basically strapped 2 payphone receivers to my head and played back test tones starting at 500hz, they concluded that my hearing was ‘perfect’ because their test was incapable of testing anything below 500hz and kept insisting that it is impossible for my hearing below 1000hz to be damaged without the upper frequencies also being effected and that me suggesting that I had done my own tests at home that proved I could not hear below 250hz was ‘disrespecting the doctor’s expertise and equipment’... I left the hospital after they refused to prescribe me the steroid
Luckily another 24 hours later and my hearing had miraculously mostly returned to normal
I AM SO GRATEFUL I CAN HEAR AGAIN
IT WAS SO SCARY THE WHOLE RIGHT SIDE OF MY HEAD FELT MUFFLED AS IF SUBMERGED IN PEANUT BUTTER
So, going forward I would very much like to make sure that I am using my closed back headphones in such a way that I do not cause myself to go deaf
How can I know what is a safe setting to use my headphones on with my iPhone?
I know that iOS 13 tracks DB output of Apple and Beats brand headphones but it does not work for other brands such as Denon.
I have read these elaborate posts regarding how to use a decibel meter on your headphones along with a dummy skull constructed out of phone and al of these elaborate setups for measuring- but all of this seems so complicated
Is there any way that I can do a test with my headphones + phone and their internal microphones OR some other way of finding this information from other people that have tested my headphones somewhere?
Any insights into any of these topics or safety best-practices would be infinitely appreciated
Thank you so much!!
Comments
Sound more like ear fatigue to me especially when using closed backs and blocking out all external ambient sounds.
Ears need to 'breathe' and blocking the air-flow can cause issues.
For me it's the opposite if I use headphones for too long one of my ears looses it's ability to hear higher frequencies and it takes a few days to recover so I avoid using closed back headphones for extended periods of time...
Open backed headphones?
https://www.soundguys.com/open-back-vs-closed-back-headphones-12179/
Are open back headphones good for mixing? Seems like the exterior sound would throw me off but I guess you get that with monitors too
I think most people recommend open back because you want some ambient noise while mixing. I might be wrong but I ended up buying open backs after research
Well today I learned. I didn’t think of it that way, now I may have to look into them. Ear fatigue really sucks
I prefer open-backed for mixing. Closed backs will always have some resonance in the bass that makes it sound thicker and less well-defined. Open-backed headphones have more accurate bass textures to my ears. Closed-back can typically go lower though, into the sub-bass which open cans can struggle with. With TB Morphit that can be improved though.
Most detailed speakers used a closed system to avoid being overly responsive at the
frequency where the cones oscillate easily. Ported speakers and open back headphones
help convert more sound from the same electrical energy... essentially boosting the bass response by not having the cones fight against a closed box. They can swing to the extremes and then have more bass from the same amp. But they have some frequencies that are over served.
Open back will allow sounds in the room to reach the ears where closed back filters that out. So, for critical mixing you would want flat frequency response and blocking local audio disturbances like you would i the physical mixing room with monitors. A mixing room would dampen resonances/reverberations and use the flat frequency monitors.
I think the role of the "mastering engineer" was a historical artifact of the vinyl processing
processing... you had to watch volumes carefully to get all the music on the vinyl but only within very narrow volume ranges compared to what we can now provide with 24-bit 96Khz music without added noise.
But the mastering engineer with great ears survives to package our music for streaming
services and do their EQ, compression/limiting magic.
They probably have good advice on protecting your hearing while spending hour mixing.
I wonder of any of them would use headphones out of concern for protecting their cochlea.
@McD
I had a similar thing happen to me over a decade ago.
I woke up and my hearing sounded like it was underwater.
I went to my local g.p to get my hearing
checked as I thought I was going deaf.
Turned out that my ears were
blocked because I had had a cold.
He recommended that I try a decongestant
and if it didn't improve return in two weeks.
A couple of days later my hearing cleared.
If you need to check the frequencies that you can hear
there are online headphone sites that can playback test tones.
Here's one of them.
This one can useful for testing speakers as well
even though it's focus is on headphones.
https://www.audiocheck.net/soundtests_headphones.php
Good to hear you're on the mend.
A few years ago I got an ear infection, never had one before in my life. I think it was at least a couple weeks I couldn't hear normally. Not fun at all.
That’s really weird about your temporary, frequency specific hearing loss. Usually when something is too loud it causes a “temporary threshold shift”, but that just sounds like everything is quieter.
No advice except to be aware volume over time is what damages your hearing, the louder something is, the shorter the period of time you can listen safely. If you’re mixing for a long time and need to check how something sounds loud, which is important, to hear if the tone is there; check it, but don’t leave it up for a long time. Try not to listen to loops of stuff while you’re zoning out trying to figure out what to do next or doing something unrelated. Electronic music can be especially hard on your ears because the frequencies that it can hit in your ears are very exact and repetitive.
One thing to be aware of is the perception of loudness changes over frequency.
Low frequencies, looking at you sub bass, takes a heck of a lot of pressure to come through in a mix over headphones. I've made this mistake. Start playing around in the mids at a satisfying volume then add a thumping sub bass, can't hear it? Turn up the bass, nope, keep going... I was having this problem with my Volca Kick. Didn't show clipping on the mixer but my ears were shot after an hour or two. I think the short answer is if it would benefit from being played through a sub woofer be very careful with the headphones.
I found this, https://subpac.com/, might be worth investigating.
Old rule, stick to it, be it computer monitors, sound monitors, headphones, seating etc.
Every hour, get up and walk away, do something else for a few minutes, do this and your eyes/ears/back/legs/brain will thank you later.
Most sage thing I’ve heard all year~ thank you for the reminder🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
Just curious but does an app exists that mutes the audio when some kind of threshold has been reached eg. when the volume reaches +xy dBFs? Reaper has it and it is a pretty nice feature when dealing or experimenting with feedback loops.
An oldie but a goodie. In a similar vein, but only for back and neck etc, I have started putting a (vertically placed) ridged foam rollerbehind me when I work at my iPad. It's about 12 inches long and I rest the area between my shoulder blades into it while working. I occasionally lean into it more to massage any tense parts. From time to time I stretch back on it while tilting my head back and stretching out my arms. This has reversed, in a mere few weeks, years and years of chronic back and neck discomfort, truly miraculous.
I just calibrated my listening levels over the weekend, and found that in my small space even 79db was too loud for me. 85 is recommended in a studio space and 79 in a home setup from the info I was following using Bob Katz’ method.
I was shocked at how all over the map my levels have been over the years, and this certainly is affecting my gain staging in my tracks too.
Listening loud can really fool you into thinking something is powerful, but I know Mutt Lange has said if you can make it have power at a low volume, then when someone turns it up that will just magnify that power. Certainly his results back it up.
One thing is for sure- once you actually do physical damage to your ears, that hearing isn’t coming back. Custom earplugs and custom in ears are really valuable tools for me for live work. It surprises me how many musicians will spend thousands on an instrument, then balk at a few hundred to protect their hearing and instead use all sorts of half measures that can actually make the problem worse.
Anyway, be careful!!