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kenji schrieb:
well one reason i bother with it is because i am an audiophile so it bothers me if at such a young age, my hearing has been affected and actually i still hear nearly upto 20khz therefore if (as in the email you sent me) these frequencies are cutoff it would affect my enjoyment of music.
Enjoyment of music is one thing, but getting obsessed with fine details is quite another. One simply doesn't need to hear up to 20kHz in order to appreciate music. Music is about integrity. It is not a sporting event where the finest details are about to be discerned.
As I said above already, getting too obsessed with fine details can in my opinion play a great part in developing of the tinnitus as well in its aggravation. It has (at least indirectly) actually caused my own tinnitus, as it led me to excessively testing some walkmans to replace my broken one. Even though this was at low volume only, I was led to use the earbuds that came with the new walkmans (and which I knew had caused me some problems (even though not tinnitus) in the past), rather than the proper headphones of my old walkman (which yielded a slightly inferior sound quality as they were not properly matched to the new walkmans).
So again, I can only warn against concentrating too much on the fine details in the music (and of those of the tinnitus of course as well). It can easily backfire later on.
Thomas
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but anyway why do you think it was the earbud which caused your tinnitus after testing different walkmans?
Were you playing music? you said it was at low level so how can an earbud do any harm?
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The earbuds prevent the pressure equalization of the ear. Essentially, you have a loudspeaker in your ear canal, and the exit of the latter is blocked, so the sound pressure in the ear canal can not fully equalize with the outside pressure. If for instance the earbud blocks 99% of the ear canal, the pressure equalization takes obviously 100 times as long (as the exit is only 1% of its normal size).
One can make a more detailed calculation here (just my own theory): the velocity of sound is about 300 m/sec = 30,000 cm/sec; if you assume the ear canal to have a length of 3 cm, it takes therefore 3/30,000 = 1/10,000 sec for a sound wave to travel through the ear canal (i.e. for the sound pressure to equalize if the exit of the ear canal is fully open). This is therefore sufficient to allow full pressure equalization for a sound wave up to a frequency of 10,000 Hz (10 kHz). However, if the exit of the ear is only 1% of its normal size it takes 100 times as long for pressure equalization, i.e. 1/100 sec, which means that only frequencies below 100 Hz can be fully pressure equalized. For all other frequencies (that is practically over the whole audible frequency spectrum) the pressure equalization can not exactly follow the sound wave anymore, and the hearing system gets confused.
I actually had always problems with these kind of ear buds before (which often led to my ears feeling 'full' after a relatively short time (30 min), even at a low volume) and many people have similar problems with these.
Thomas
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so are you saying it is the sound pressure changes in air which are problematic?
firstly, do you think wearing earplugs alone is also bad? because they are airtight too. what could happen if i do this over the long term?
secondly, if it is just the loudspeaker in your ear which is the problem you are pointing out, i dont understand because if the earbuid seals the ear canal, then there is air trapped between the earbud and eardrum so the earbud only just 'pushes and pulls' this air?
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No what I mean is that the loudspeaker permanently pumps acoustic energy in the form of sound waves into your ear canal, which then can not escape again if the exit is blocked.
Normally, if a sound wave enters your ear canal from the outside, it travels to your eardrum, is reflected there and travels out again (I would think that only a small amount of energy is lost at the ear drum).
However, in case of the loudspeaker in the earbud, the sound wave travels to the eardrum, is reflected there, then travels back to the earbud, is again largely reflected there, and arrives at your eardrum again. This may then even happen several times (each time taking about 1/5,000 sec). This means that in effect you have several times the sound pressure acting on your eardrum. Of course, you could turn the volume down accordingly, but it is still not the same, as this is not a proper sound wave anymore, but something that is overlaid with several echoes (which you can't here because of the short time scale, but which I presume will completely confuse the hearing system as there is not a proper sinusoidal signal anymore).
Of course, if there is no loudspeaker creating the sound waves inside your blocked ear canal, this problem doesn't exist, so it is not an issue in case of simple ear plugs.
Thomas
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how do the ears 'know' when damage ought to occur ?
whats interesting is that it is not direct damage but rather a chemical reaction which causes hair cell death.
I am suffering hyperacusis, so things sound louder than normal. Yet does this mean lower sounds will cause damage?
I dont think so.
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and when wearing earplugs i notice a drop in high frequency hearing AFTER taking the plugs out. What is the mechanism behind this?
unfortunately its not easy to find answers to questions like that online, so the only option is to find out myself.
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Kenji,
You would know if damage has occurred, as then you would have some hearing loss (and even that could be just due to a threshold shift rather than hair cell damage).
The hyperacusis is merely a shift in the perception, so it would be unreasonable to assume that actual hearing damage can in this case be caused by sounds that didn't cause it without hyperacusis.
Your earplug observation is somewhat strange. Earplugs absorb primarily the high frequencies, so one should expect that you hear the high frequencies better if you take them out.
Thomas
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Sorry to bump up and old post but Thomas do you recommend standard over the ear headphones (not the noise canceling kind)?
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