How bad are walkmen/headphones for your hearing, really?

How the fuck do you avoid that shit? I don't want to stop listening to music.
Do I just have to listen real quiet?

my dad's been half deaf since the 60's too
but for a much cooler, scouser-in-the-sixties reason.
he blames the volume in The Cavern circa '62.

I think I have tinnitus too, but maybe it's mild or something because I don't really notice it living in a city. But when I'm somewhere REALLY silent, like at a cottage or something, it drives me crazy. It sounds like there's a TV on inside my head but with the sound off - just that high-pitched electronic 'eeeeeeee'. Which is precisely what I DON'T want to hear when I'm getting 'away from the city and all the noise', etc..

Of course, that sort of volume would be horrible if you're walking around in a town, as you wouldn't hear much of the music.

That being said, I'm a tinnitus-dork too, though I blame the army for mine (though foolshiness on my own part made it worse! Damn you Nomeansno and me attending despite having forgotten earplugs!)

What scares me about tinnitus isn't so much how it is now, but the idea of how it might be in 20 years, let alone 40.
I mean, there's always the hope of someone finding a way to fix it, but those prospects don't look very (what's that you're saying?) right now.
Oh, and it's cut down on my enjoyment of classical music, since now it's all "HEY!! I AM THE BIG LOUD ORCHESTRA BIT! BRB! hey-BZZZZ-i-BZZZZZZ-am-BZZZZZZZ-the-BZZZZZZZZZ-calm-BZZZZZZ-part g2glol ^_^BZZZZZZZZ HEY IT'S THE LOUD BIT AGAIN! WOO!"

Worst idea ever: find a message board about tinnitus. I stumbled upon one a few years ago and browed around a bit. At NO other point in my life has my tinnitus bothered me as much as during the couple of weeks when I followed that board a bit. It made me think about it constantly and notice every hint of it whenever there was any level of quiet.

I suggest a good pair of headphones and a good walkman; if the sound is good you wont be so tempted to crank it up and do damage.

I was buying ice cream with my headphones on today (I always keep my MD playing, and just shift one cup off of my ear) and the guy was making annoying remarks about going deaf. I didn’t like his attitude so I thanked him for his concern, and he thanked me for my visit (‘It was a real pleasure!’). That guy makes the best ice cream in Amsterdam, though.

Just don't listen to them too loud.

Although, thanks to that, I found out that the Chipmunks were actually real people whose voice waves strayed to close to the event horizon of a black hole.

Not actual chipmunks.

>There is if you still love music when you're 87 and can't fucking hear it cos you're deaf.

BAAAAAAH... by then, they will have invented some sort of super high-tech gizmo implant that will allow you to listen to music directly inside your brain!! No more wires, etc. iPods will be irrelevant - you will be able to stream whatever song you want to hear immeditately from a giant database somewhere just by thinking about it! Reminds me of that Onion article 'I have an iPod IN MY HEAD')

I'm 21 and I have that constant ringing in my ears, mostly from crappy high school band practices - I first noticed it when I was 19. I've played drums for 10 years, and used earplugs about half the time in my garage but never at school. I think everyone in my high school jazz band has some small degree of the ringing, although the serious musicians and concertgoers had it to a greater extent. It is really hard for me to fall asleep at night with the ringing so I leave my computer on - a small amount of background noise will eliminate your consciousness of the ringing, so those of you with problems could try a noise generator at night - even at a very low, barely-perceptible level, it'll take your mind off the ringing... unless you've got it pretty bad. I hear there is some method of getting rid of the ringing by reproducing the same frequency but reversing the phase, but I don't know anything about that and it doesn't sound very practical. Earplugs at shows, always.

my friend uses a fan for white background noise.

I think the needle thing would be more dangerous.

Haha! oops=

http://www.posternow.com/imagem/l/l2156.jpg

I reckon mowing the lawn while listening to a walkman is probably certain damage every time. Still do it though.

You're otm about loudness/dance music though. If it's too quiet it doesn't have any punch and just sounds kind of annoying. Plus you miss out on all the details in the production.

My ears hurt for several days afterwards.

1. The inconsistency in the design of the human body which leads to our damageable eyes having flaps to screen them when light gets too bright but our ears having no 'lids' to protect them from too much sound.

2. The way excess volumes are considered normal in our society and my profession, and how these volumes are usually just an expression of insensitivity or egotism on the part of musicians, or the direct result of people's failure to pay sufficient attention to small things.

I've started going to live music in the post-noise improv style. The last two shows I saw here in Berlin were extremely quiet and demanded pindrop silence from the audience -- you really could hear everybody's stomach rumbling as the musicians blew air through (but did not play) trumpets and tubas while laptops clicked microscopically. Even at these types of shows, though, there's always a moment when a 100 dB ultra-high pitch sine wave suddenly bursts out before you can reach your earplugs. Fuckers!

yeah that's me. that's not good for you, you say?

A couple of weeks ago i heard Francisco Lopez perform. It was very quiet for the first 10 minutes or so, and everyone was wearing blindfolds so our ears were probably more sensitive than usual. He then slowly started introducing louder and louder bits and I started hoping he wasn't going to be an asshole and blast some really abrasive noise. It did eventually get louder, but it built up slow enough to not be painful. I haven't been to many noise shows since I assumed a large part of them were based on aural assault (which I imagine some are) but this was sort of a pleasant surprise.

Noise-induced hearing loss and portable radios with headphones.

Catalano PJ, Levin SM.

Portable radio/cassette players with headphones have gained increasing
popularity in recent years. Volume settings are often increased to override environmental noise, perhaps placing the listener at risk for noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). A total of 190 public college students in NYC were studied via a self-administered questionnaire regarding the volume setting used and weekly exposure in hours to these units. Three popular models were tested using
a Bruel and Kjaer sound level meter, octave band filter and artificial ear. Sound levels were measured at various frequencies (250-8000 Hz) and an overall measurement obtained using the "A"-weighted scale. Based on OSHA criteria for permissible noise dose (i.e. intensity X duration) in the work place, auditory risk criteria were developed. Of all students who used such radios 31.4% equalled or exceeded the maximum allowable dose permitted by these criteria (41.2% of the males and 29.2% of females). This sex-related difference in risk, while not statistically significant, warrants further investigation. Of the
total 'at risk' group 50% exceeded the risk criteria by more than 100%. These results suggest that portable radios with headphones may be capable of causing permanent hearing loss in a large proportion of radio users.

Sorry I don't have the full article, so I can't determine what the "maximum allowable dose" or what their criteria was specifically; however I'm guessing New Yorkers blast their headphones more than Berliners based on the outcome of this study:

HNO. 1994 Dec;42(12):764-8.

[Risk of hearing loss caused by listening to music with head phones]

[Article in German]

Ising H, Hanel J, Pilgramm M, Babisch W, Lindthammer A.

Umweltbundesamt, Institut fur Wasser-, Boden- und Lufthygiene, Berlin.

Sound levels of music played from mini-cassette players via headphones were measured in a nonrepresentative group of 681 pupils whose ages were between 10 to 19 years. Each pupil completed a questionnaire giving the total time spent listening to music each day. The pupils set the music levels (free field corrected short time Leq) between 60 dB(A) and 110 dB(A). In the age group from 12-16 years, 10% chose 110 dB(A). Nearly 50% of the total group usually listened to music less than one hour per day, and just less than 10% listened for four or
more hours. The energy equivalent of continuous sound pressure level for an exposure time of 8 h per day was for 55% Leq 8 h < 66 dB(A) and for 7% Leq 8 h > 95 dB(A) while 4% had an Leq 8 h > 105 dB(A). Estimation of the expected hearing losses (HL) were based on ISO 1999: about 10% of the total group were predicted to have a HL > 10 dB at 4 kHz after 5 years. After listening to sound in this manner 0.3% were expected to develop hearing losses at age 25 years that would be severe enough to substantially impair speech intelligibility.

There are a bunch of these types of journals which study the impact of working in certain professions on hearing (e.g. radio personalities, dance club workers, etc), or stranger things such as what determines the intelligibility of communication among air line pilots. If you are interested one of them (Noise and Health) has back issues online at http://juno.ingentaselect.com/vl=1258365/cl=25/nw=1/rpsv/cw/nrn/14631741/contp1.htm

Aparrently amongst Eskimos the men tend to go deaf really young, in their 30s or so. This puzzled anthropologists for a while until one day some of them accompanied a hunter on a fishing expedition. They went out trekking for a couple of hours, and then carved a hole in the ground, and caught a fish (using a rod, line, and hook). After pulling the fish out of the hole, the hunter took out his rifle and shot it in the head (a big fish). This was extremely painful for the anthropologists because their ears had adjusted to the near silence they'd been in for hours, only to have them blasted by the huge noise of the gun.

The E2s were kind of expensive (although still cheaper than mid-range Sennheisers or low-end Grados), but they give great sound and have a two year warranty. You should be able to pick up a pair for under $80 if you look online.

I'm still pissed at my younger self for not wearing earplugs more though.

I got some Shure E2s for Christmas. Initially, I was apprehensive about pushing them so deep into the canal, but I've gotten used to it. Only thing that bugs me now - and I guess this varies according to which caps you find most comfortable (I think this might only apply to the black rubber caps - - but is it healthy when they a create sort of vacuum inside? I don't necessarily have to push them any deeper, but they kind of suck themselves in at some points. I find the sound quality and volume are slightly diminished when this happens, and it just feels wrong, like every time I take them out it's tugging on my ear drum.

Get good quality headphones, so you don't have to crank the volume to hear the details of the music, and keep your volume a bit low. Right now I love Koss Portasounds (which look like shit, but have great sound imo), after years of slugging it out with various Sony MDR's. Can't stand those in-ear phones, they just wear out my ears, sound awful after an hour or so.

what about sound canelling headphones? do they help much? are they always battery powered?

I actually like the in-ear type precisely because they block out external noise and let me listen at reassonable volumes. Esp. on airplanes, where with normal earbuds or headphones you always have to turn up to 10 to hear over the engine noise.

In-ears turn out to be much less fatiguing, and much less of a PITA than active noice-cancelers.