It is no secret that prolonged exposure to loud sound is highly damaging to our hearing. Listening to loud music is one of the common factors leading to degraded hearing ability and tinnitus, and is deeply unhealthy.
At the same time, such level of noise negatively impacts the quality of sound perception, which degrades the musical side of the musical performance.
In what seems to be the echoes of the so-called “loudness war”, bands still stick to the idea that “the louder you blast it - the better”. But it’s not true. There are many other ways to energize the crowd without causing them sound damage, and I’d love to see more of those, instead of them trying to be the loudest ever.
We’re way beyond that. Overly loud bands are so 1980s. Overly loud rock bands are why I became a Blues fan.
However these days I’m more concerned about sporting events. In the last year I’ve been to multiple hockey games where the volume is painful and my watch frequently records over 100bB. The new Islanders arena was absolute worst, with every announcement or music over 90 dB and peaking at 115dB. Do you know what would energize me more than covering my ears in pain? Being able to hear the crowd, participate in cheers or chants
On the alternate I’ve been to concerts where you just couldn’t hear the band playing unless you pressed into everyone at the front. Was a terrible experience and felt like I wasted my money. I’m a big fan of putting in ear plugs, eating an edible and then riding out the vibrations. I agree there must be a good middle ground but I would rather it too loud with ear pro than too quiet.
I see! At some point powerful vibes can be gone as well - which is something I do not normally consider since I’m not necessarily into hardcore metal or something.
Doesn’t need to be metal to have a bass or drum line that shakes your ass.
I wear musicians earplugs pretty much any time I’m in a crowded place because the people are the loudest and noisiest things. A quieter music act would be quickly drowned out. But, the earplugs help me hear everything better (the music, the people next to me trying to talk to me, general situational awareness) because they only block the damaging parts to the sound without muffling everything.
If you have ever felt the relief of silence after being in a noisy environment, musicians earplugs on a keychain with you always will change the way you interact with the loud world we live in. They have saved me from unnecessary stress, anxiety, and further hearing loss at work, on a night out with friends, crowded bars, clubs, outdoor events, conferences, malls. I appreciate well engineered sound design, like FEELING the sound wash over and through me. But bad acoustics, noisy people, and tinnitus stress me the fuck out.
TLDR: I wear musicians earplugs mostly because of people and they help me hear everything better and feel better even if they’re not needed to avoid injury.
Same issue I mentioned in my comment! There’s a constant battle happening between the audio engineers and the noise floor of the the venue. It surprisingly doesn’t take too much more db to be heard above the crowd, like in a perfect world, if the crowd is sitting at 90db then 95db would be ideal. But unfortunately a crowd’s loudness ebs and flows and that can easily get drowned out so most just default to 100db and embrace the inevitable tinnitus. I recommend everyone invest in Earasers or something of that quality so y’all can appreciate music safely without losing all of the dynamics.
Protect your hearing.
I did not and today, at the age of 54, I cannot hear above 13khz when I used to be able to hear above 20khz. Part of that is age, but most of it is from not using hearing protection at concerts and other activities where I should have been using it.
Any constant noise above 80db will damage your hearing. 80db is a LOT quieter than you think it is.
most of it is from not using hearing protection at concerts and other activities where I should have been using it.
You mean like firing a pistol in an elevator?
I’m taking live sound classes at my community college right now and we talked about this yesterday. The biggest issue with a large venue packed with people is the noise floor is very high. For instance if the crowd is 90db, then you’ve only got 10-20db of headroom to work with. 90db is already enough to cause hearing damage after 8 hours, and it gets exponentially worse with just a few db more, by 100 you can only safely be in that for 2 hours and that is generally the ideal loudness for that kind of venue. Of course since the engineers probably have hearing loss, they tend to raise it even higher to 110 which is loud enough to still cause damage over time even with regular earbuds unfortunately. So unless you can have a quiet crowd there is nothing you can do about needing ear protection, I recommend hanging by the engineer booth because they tend to be just far enough away to comfortably hear everything around 90db because they generally can’t use earbuds while actively mixing.
Could not agree more. I love the idea of live music but in practice it’s a miserable experience unless you’ve already suffered significant hearing loss.
Maybe someday people will stop putting up with this and I’ll be able to enjoy it but this idea seems a long way away.
I’d sooooo much love to go to concerts more once they are quieter!
This would make it so so much of a better experience
I’m a music producer and there is/was a “Loudness War” and several people say loud won. To clarify: for your tracks to qualify when uploading them to Spotify I believe they have to be a minimum of -10 LUFS. I’m not going to pretend that I know what a LUFS is fully, but I have software to tell me where my LUFS is at. If you don’t hit at least -10 LUFS they will fake it for you, with usually terrible results.
So now all producers are mixing to -10 LUFS and higher (-8 or -9), all for the sake of possibly getting radio play in the future, although not all music sounds good when mixed so damn loudly. I know this is tangentially related but
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
