Hearing loss is very serious. You know your body better than anyone else so don't be afraid to be its biggest advocate and protector. Nobody else will.
I once had tinnitus for a week after a concert and it was one of the worst weeks of my life, it felt like it would last forever (and for some people, it does). I had pristine, "golden ears" for audio engineering and was afraid about how much I'd be able to recover. I missed even the boring high pitched squeaks of doorknobs, faucets, etc. Everything was muffled. Since then, I've been wearing Etymotic earplugs at concerts (the few I went to).
There is research on proper restoration of the cilia (ear hair that allows us to hear), but we don't know if it's a "hardware" problem (these hairs), "software" problem (brain), or both, in what amounts. So it's far away (EDIT: if it's even possible at all...). Hearing aids are not something you want to fall back on. It's not like eyes with glasses and contacts. Be careful.
There is no cure for hearing damage. Your body can recover from slight damage after a few weeks but generally trauma to hair cells, synapses and auditory nerve is accumulative and overtime they loose their ability to recover.
There's currently no way to regenerate these. There was a promising company attempting to do this and they recently announced discontinuation of phase 3 trials as their drug showed no significant change against placebo.
The drug was in development for almost 9 years before it reached phase 3 and failed.
There's no silver-bullet cure for hearing damage, but there are cures and effective treatment for the underlying causes, which can result in a cure for hearing damage.
The treatment and prognosis is highly dependent on the underlying cause. Cilia damage probably won't be curable until after a lot more stem cell research. Neurological damage is hard to impossible to cure depending on the age and neuroplasticity of the patient. TMJ or Eustachian tube dysfunction can lead to hearing damage that goes away once the underlying issue is treated.
This misinformation has killed people. Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor committed suicide after being diagnosed with tinnitus and being told it was untreatable, even though his tinnitus was caused by a COVID-19 infection causing inflammation. The treatment for that, which is highly effective, is two weeks of prednisone, with intratympanic steroid injections in severe cases.
In my experience and according to literature, there are cures for hearing damage. N-acetylcysteine, for one.
I had been taking N-acetylcysteine (NAC) regularly for a while for reasons completely unrelated to hearing. I unmistakably noticed my hearing to improve. High frequency hearing once lost came back.
I didn’t believe it. Looked on Google Scholar. The effect is known.
Thanks for that update, I heard about it only once years ago. Yeah safest thing is to assume it can't come back, and be aware of the accumulation, as you said.
Yeah it can’t be stressed enough, if you go to live events, get concert earplugs and wear them religiously. You hear the music better anyway.
It’s been sad to see friends fail to heed this advice. You don’t want to be that person who needs hearing aids at age 50 due to something you could have prevented with a little forethought.
Etymotic are great and were my standby for years. Recently upgraded to Earasers on the recommendation of a musician friend and I am very happy with them, frequently forget they are even there.
I recently got earasers, mainly to make it easier to hear people over music (I have auditory processing disorder), however I have found them just to muffle everything, making the music a good level, but speech unbearable.
Is this your experience?
Wondering because maybe I'm doing something wrong or maybe I chose the wrong level of them (I think I chose the regular EU level).
Hah hah. Good for you being able to recover. Got permanent tinnnitus from one mistake on not wearing hearing protection once when cutting stone table and i was hoovering the dust. Good thing is, you get used to it. Whatever you thought total silence was, it is gone now. Just have to work your brains towards not givin an f and you should be fine living with hearing damage. Just dont make it worse. You'll remember then the initial anxiety of losing it in the first place.
This is impossible for me. As a self proclaimed hypersensitive person with hyperacusis and misophonia, I would rather fight and claw my way out of any kind of concert or disco rather than suffering from the loud noises. Any kind of concert or disco noise means intense pain to me. Like getting stabbed in the ears.
I found a solution and peace in ear plugs, with them I can enjoy discos and anything else like normal people.
Now one question for you: I do realize the majority of humans can stand those levels of noise without earplugs and without any apparent discomfort. Do all you normies and neurotypicals simply do not have this intense pain reaction to loud noise? How the hell could you suffer through a concert so loud it gave you tinnitus without passing out from pain?
> Now one question for you: I do realize the majority of humans can stand those levels of noise without earplugs and without any apparent discomfort. Do all you normies and neurotypicals simply do not have this intense pain reaction to loud noise? How the hell could you suffer through a concert so loud it gave you tinnitus without passing out from pain?
Most venues have terrible sound. This can be the result of bad acoustics, a poor quality/poorly tuned sound system, or performers who don’t know what they are doing and think loud = good sound. When I’m in one of those I have your reaction.
In venues with a well-tuned, high quality soundsystem being used properly, your ears shouldn’t hurt much.
But why run the risk of damaging your hearing? Everyone should be wearing earplugs at live events anyway.
Musical noise rarely gives me any issues, though some of the weirder electronic/noise/artsy punk shows have been problematic. Usually it is in short bursts though, I can't think of a show I actually left due to the noise. I enjoy music I can feel but I am very diligent about earplug usage to the point that I bring extras to share just in case. I typically pull each earplug out for a few seconds on each side to see if I'm missing much. There is something very different about listening to Earth for example at show volume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiCIW04PF3I
Unfortunately my tinnitus stemmed from lightning. I'm fortunate that it doesn't seem noticeable all the time.
I'm the exact same way. I assume our brain translates loud noises into physical side effects while normal brains just don't. Same way anxiety, or an anxiety disorder, can cause physical effects like sweating or increased heart rates when having symptoms.
Personally, I like it because I worry about hearing loss and it's a kind of protective measure, while other people don't seem to care when they're damaging their ears. I also hate it because I can look like a lunatic getting physically uncomfortable when everyone else is fine.
Most people don't feel pain at the concert and they only notice the tinnitus the following day.
I used to go to thrash punk gigs years ago - but not many so didn't do noticeable damage before I learned about the risk and started wearing ear plugs.
I got tinnitus at 15 from an airplane ride maxxing out my headphones. So 15 years ago. Its fine, you get used to it after 2-3 weeks. Yes it never went away. Buckle up butter cup.
And all of them used with current iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS offer default volume limits and proactive notifications about excess decibels, set quite low, and iPhones themselves offer environmental volume warnings as well now.
To get hearing damage generally requires disabling or raising levels on this feature not on offer from most players+headsets.
Generally, sure. But some of us are raising the possibility that there's something else going on that isn't captured by the limits, notifications and warnings. I didn't mention it in my original post but I always used my AirPod Max with the hard cap decibel limit set to the minimum value, and even then I wouldn't have them turned all the way up.
I have AirPods and get tinnitus which comes and goes. At max volume they sound good but will make my ears ring after. It's the same for any headphones / loud noise source really. The answer is to turn it down a bit. I'd be willing to bet its the sound level that's the main thing rather than the type of headphone. For me 80db is fine, 100db causes issues but I'm sure people vary.
There are so many variables to this it's obnoxious. What do you define as loud? Are you using them in ANC? Is it regular Airpods or Airpods Pro? Do you notice tinnitus after using ear plugs for a while? When listening to music other ways?
I have tinnitus due to ear infections when I was younger. In my subjective experience, my AirPod Pro's have not changed it in any meaningful way. I use them enough that I have two pairs of APP so I can swap when the batteries die. Now I also have added AirPod Max when I don't want the "joys" of fully in ear. Only mention that because they have similar ANC.
The challenge with tinnitus is that it's highly subjective and can vary based on a lot of things. Just take a skim of https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tinnitus/symp... -- There are 8 "Other causes" listed, with the last one being "including diabetes, thyroid problems, migraines, anemia, and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have all been associated with tinnitus."
There are certainly days when my Tinnitus is worse, to the point where I have to have sound on to keep me mentally stable. Other days when I forget I even have it.
TLDR: If you have ringing in your ears that is bothering you, see a doctor.
the basic answer is that tinnitus is inflammation. so in order we reduce inflammation is either sumpplementation of food or avoidance of behavior that induces that response so the avoidance is possible through strength and conditioning like another commentor mentioned tensor tympani muscle activation is primary defense. secondary would be healthy diet.
furthermore : a device that augments noise cancellation invokes a third princiople regarding muscles use it or lose it.
theres a single cause to this which is damage to cilary hairs now under my own subjective belief is that these are a growable or compensatable based on the outcome of blind patients with increased hearing ability
conclusion: ears do heal if the body is subjected with significant stress invoking amplitude
same with any other possiblw ailment
also finally since this was orignal about ringing in ears. this is overcomeable the ringing might be there still but the closest analogy i can give is layering. the human mind can extroplolate patterns amplify them
I wonder if it's the noise cancellation causing problems. I definitely hear a high-pitched noise from the noise cancellation feature and rarely use it at all specifically because of that, except very infrequently like on planes. Maybe the high frequency noise is damaging the ear drums at high frequencies?
But I can definitely say I do not have tinnitus despite wearing AirPod Maxes quite often.
Ummmm. ANC attenuates certain frequencies and fails to attenuate other frequencies. Which you would end up hearing anyway if you weren’t wearing the headphones. So effectively the sound power reaching your ears didn’t change for those frequencies.
I have worked on ANC systems in automotive applications.
theoretically. it's never going to match the input exactly though and therefore it will generate noise of its own. it's conceivable that there would be less variation in this noise, due to quantized nature of the system that synthesizes the cancellation, and that a fixed synthesized signal for long durations could exhaust parts of the cochlea that are used to the high variability of natural sounds and/or trigger an adaptation in auditory cortex.
or the software is bad or the anc mic fails, and it generates a high pitched whine that causes short term tinnitus.
just spitballing because it's fun. would be interesting to analyze the frequency responses to benchtop and realistic scenarios for anc in modern earbuds.
also would be interesting to understand the psychophysical response to those behaviors!
Your ears are a complex system. Just like when your eyes think it's darker, your pupils dilate, your ears have a similar method of controlling how much sound gets to the sensitive bits.
It's possible that ANC convinces your ear to open up a bit more, leading to damage in the frequencies that it doesn't attenuate.
I wonder if the ANC is actually bringing out latent tinnitus that was already there, but we don't often experience sudden transitions to and from silence where tinnitus becomes most notable.
There's evidence that in urban environments street noise is loud enough to cause hearing loss over time. Millennials or younger have basically worn headphones their whole lives as well, and only recently have devices started alerting for dangerous exposure. If you've listened to music or a podcast on a plane or the bus with earbuds then the volume would have been at dangerous levels.
I don't want to imply ANC may not cause tinnitus (this should be explored), but I suspect the reason people feel it wares off also has to do with the brain acclimating to background noise again.
I'm convinced that this is it. The DSPs and speakers aren't fast enough to instantly create a counterwave, so I guess sometimes it will amplify the external sound, even in some kind of distorted manner since even the amplification-component won't be identical to the incoming external sound.
I was looking for this comment - I have a different ANC headphone, and I definitely noticed that it puts a new kind of pressure on my ears. Not often, but only when the ANC is activated, and when I have been using it for an extended time. No tinnitus here either, just something I noticed.
I also don't have tinnitus, and like you don't use noise cancellation much at all (planes being just about the only time). I find the Maxes sound very good in normal mode and block out a lot of noise on their own. But these noise cancellation modes could be a cause for concern.
Yes. There's been suggestions from multiple papers that exactly this is the case. Granted, "you get what you search for" on the internet, but I think you'll agree that search results for this are more than that.
This is very interesting. I've noticed my tinnitus has seemed to be worse as of late. I exclusively use AirPods Pro. I wouldn't say I listen to loud music, but I'm wondering if the noise cancellation could have something to do with it...
AirPods Pro noise cancellation almost definitely gave me temporary tinnitus after a few months of usage even though I never listened to music that loud. Switched to regular AirPods two years ago and the tinnitus entirely went away.
Same here, just having ANC enabled without any audio for 1-2 hours and tinnitus is clearly noticeable. For that reason I’ve discarded all AirPods Pro in my family
I have tinnitus and AirPod pros and haven’t noticed any difference. I do find that not drinking out of straws or especially camelpak style bottles with straws really minimizes it. Also, more sleep, less tinnitus
I have had tinnitus for years, and have never felt comfortable with noise cancelling headphones. Purely anecdotal, of course, and even regular headphones are uncomfortable after awhile, but active noise cancellation is unbearable for me
I don't own AirPods, but one of the things that I've struggled with after the proliferation of headphone jack removal is that on all the Bluetooth headphones/earbuds I've tried the lowest volume setting is still too loud. I normally use Shure SE215s wired, but I've tried the Sennheiser PXC550, Sony WH-1000XM3, Jabra Elite 7 Sport with similar impressions, and tried using my work 2021 MacBook Pro as the audio source instead of my phone. Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way?
On my Samsung phone, I've had to manually set individual app volumes to 80% via Sound Assistant, have additional volume steps enabled, and have the system sound set to the lowest setting when using Bluetooth.
Bought 1MORE BT per Wirecutter’s recommendation and I’ve had the exact same problem, complete with tinnitus tendencies. The minimum volume seems highest when connected to my iPad.
I have pretty much stopped using my AirPods (and mostly headphones connected to the iPhone) after reading that emergency alerts can cause hearing damage:
You can turn these off in the US, although not in some other countries (like Canada). Go to Settings -> Notifications, scroll down past the long list of apps, and then disable (as of this writing) AMBER Alerts, Emergency Alerts, Public Safety Alerts, and Test Alerts.
That said, I live in a part of the country where the government won't be able to tell you that a horrible disaster is coming (earthquake country). If I lived in Tornado Alley or someplace that floods, I'd have mulled over the emergency and public-safety alerts switches longer.
But I don't want to turn it off. We got a useful warning about a nearby fire causing soot (this is in The Netherlands), allowing us to close our windows timely.
Are there any software approaches that can properly modulate and equalize sound based on the various hardware factors and user preference? It seems like it should be possible.
More anecdotes! I use the AirPod Pros many hours a day and have mild tinnitus. I find the noise canceling makes me more aware of the singing in my ears. I don't live in a place where silence happens, but the cancelling will kill the outside noise enough for me to remember that the ears are always singing to themselves.
For people experiencing loud noises, be aware that if the microphones can come loose, then they can get weird transients from vibration, shock, or even the sound being driven through the AirPods. The original AirPods were subject to that, I had mine replaced once and when they came loose again stopped using them. (Gross note: the original ones made me more subject to disgusting things happening best left unmentioned when used many hours a day. That was most of the reason for not getting them replaced again. The new ones definitely breathe better and don't cause me trouble.)
Yeah, I got a very early pair and they started to break down after about a month. Random pops and sharp high-pitched sounds, before eventually they stopped working at all
A few months ago I decided to see if they'd worked out the kinks and got a new pair of Gen 2 ones. Those have been working pretty much flawlessly
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I once had tinnitus for a week after a concert and it was one of the worst weeks of my life, it felt like it would last forever (and for some people, it does). I had pristine, "golden ears" for audio engineering and was afraid about how much I'd be able to recover. I missed even the boring high pitched squeaks of doorknobs, faucets, etc. Everything was muffled. Since then, I've been wearing Etymotic earplugs at concerts (the few I went to).
There is research on proper restoration of the cilia (ear hair that allows us to hear), but we don't know if it's a "hardware" problem (these hairs), "software" problem (brain), or both, in what amounts. So it's far away (EDIT: if it's even possible at all...). Hearing aids are not something you want to fall back on. It's not like eyes with glasses and contacts. Be careful.
There's currently no way to regenerate these. There was a promising company attempting to do this and they recently announced discontinuation of phase 3 trials as their drug showed no significant change against placebo.
The drug was in development for almost 9 years before it reached phase 3 and failed.
There's no silver-bullet cure for hearing damage, but there are cures and effective treatment for the underlying causes, which can result in a cure for hearing damage.
The treatment and prognosis is highly dependent on the underlying cause. Cilia damage probably won't be curable until after a lot more stem cell research. Neurological damage is hard to impossible to cure depending on the age and neuroplasticity of the patient. TMJ or Eustachian tube dysfunction can lead to hearing damage that goes away once the underlying issue is treated.
This misinformation has killed people. Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor committed suicide after being diagnosed with tinnitus and being told it was untreatable, even though his tinnitus was caused by a COVID-19 infection causing inflammation. The treatment for that, which is highly effective, is two weeks of prednisone, with intratympanic steroid injections in severe cases.
I had been taking N-acetylcysteine (NAC) regularly for a while for reasons completely unrelated to hearing. I unmistakably noticed my hearing to improve. High frequency hearing once lost came back.
I didn’t believe it. Looked on Google Scholar. The effect is known.
The literature supports it; here’s just one paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2021.6594...
Antioxidant properties seem to be what’s helping, and I’d guess it’s the mucolytic aspect of NAC as well.
It’s been sad to see friends fail to heed this advice. You don’t want to be that person who needs hearing aids at age 50 due to something you could have prevented with a little forethought.
Etymotic are great and were my standby for years. Recently upgraded to Earasers on the recommendation of a musician friend and I am very happy with them, frequently forget they are even there.
Is this your experience?
Wondering because maybe I'm doing something wrong or maybe I chose the wrong level of them (I think I chose the regular EU level).
This is impossible for me. As a self proclaimed hypersensitive person with hyperacusis and misophonia, I would rather fight and claw my way out of any kind of concert or disco rather than suffering from the loud noises. Any kind of concert or disco noise means intense pain to me. Like getting stabbed in the ears.
I found a solution and peace in ear plugs, with them I can enjoy discos and anything else like normal people.
Now one question for you: I do realize the majority of humans can stand those levels of noise without earplugs and without any apparent discomfort. Do all you normies and neurotypicals simply do not have this intense pain reaction to loud noise? How the hell could you suffer through a concert so loud it gave you tinnitus without passing out from pain?
Most venues have terrible sound. This can be the result of bad acoustics, a poor quality/poorly tuned sound system, or performers who don’t know what they are doing and think loud = good sound. When I’m in one of those I have your reaction.
In venues with a well-tuned, high quality soundsystem being used properly, your ears shouldn’t hurt much.
But why run the risk of damaging your hearing? Everyone should be wearing earplugs at live events anyway.
Unfortunately my tinnitus stemmed from lightning. I'm fortunate that it doesn't seem noticeable all the time.
Personally, I like it because I worry about hearing loss and it's a kind of protective measure, while other people don't seem to care when they're damaging their ears. I also hate it because I can look like a lunatic getting physically uncomfortable when everyone else is fine.
I used to go to thrash punk gigs years ago - but not many so didn't do noticeable damage before I learned about the risk and started wearing ear plugs.
t. not american.
At this scale, it's nearly impossible to separate coincidence from causality in scattered anecdotes.
To get hearing damage generally requires disabling or raising levels on this feature not on offer from most players+headsets.
I have tinnitus due to ear infections when I was younger. In my subjective experience, my AirPod Pro's have not changed it in any meaningful way. I use them enough that I have two pairs of APP so I can swap when the batteries die. Now I also have added AirPod Max when I don't want the "joys" of fully in ear. Only mention that because they have similar ANC.
The challenge with tinnitus is that it's highly subjective and can vary based on a lot of things. Just take a skim of https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tinnitus/symp... -- There are 8 "Other causes" listed, with the last one being "including diabetes, thyroid problems, migraines, anemia, and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have all been associated with tinnitus."
There are certainly days when my Tinnitus is worse, to the point where I have to have sound on to keep me mentally stable. Other days when I forget I even have it.
TLDR: If you have ringing in your ears that is bothering you, see a doctor.
This creates the ideal environment for both introducing bacteria to the ear canal as well as promoting their growth.
theres a single cause to this which is damage to cilary hairs now under my own subjective belief is that these are a growable or compensatable based on the outcome of blind patients with increased hearing ability
conclusion: ears do heal if the body is subjected with significant stress invoking amplitude same with any other possiblw ailment
also finally since this was orignal about ringing in ears. this is overcomeable the ringing might be there still but the closest analogy i can give is layering. the human mind can extroplolate patterns amplify them
But I can definitely say I do not have tinnitus despite wearing AirPod Maxes quite often.
I have worked on ANC systems in automotive applications.
or the software is bad or the anc mic fails, and it generates a high pitched whine that causes short term tinnitus.
just spitballing because it's fun. would be interesting to analyze the frequency responses to benchtop and realistic scenarios for anc in modern earbuds.
also would be interesting to understand the psychophysical response to those behaviors!
Serious question, because I see it so often: what are these fillers meant to achieve?
It's possible that ANC convinces your ear to open up a bit more, leading to damage in the frequencies that it doesn't attenuate.
There's evidence that in urban environments street noise is loud enough to cause hearing loss over time. Millennials or younger have basically worn headphones their whole lives as well, and only recently have devices started alerting for dangerous exposure. If you've listened to music or a podcast on a plane or the bus with earbuds then the volume would have been at dangerous levels.
I don't want to imply ANC may not cause tinnitus (this should be explored), but I suspect the reason people feel it wares off also has to do with the brain acclimating to background noise again.
On my Samsung phone, I've had to manually set individual app volumes to 80% via Sound Assistant, have additional volume steps enabled, and have the system sound set to the lowest setting when using Bluetooth.
https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/c8s6yi/eardrums_dest...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7naqg/apple-airpods-hearing...
That said, I live in a part of the country where the government won't be able to tell you that a horrible disaster is coming (earthquake country). If I lived in Tornado Alley or someplace that floods, I'd have mulled over the emergency and public-safety alerts switches longer.
For people experiencing loud noises, be aware that if the microphones can come loose, then they can get weird transients from vibration, shock, or even the sound being driven through the AirPods. The original AirPods were subject to that, I had mine replaced once and when they came loose again stopped using them. (Gross note: the original ones made me more subject to disgusting things happening best left unmentioned when used many hours a day. That was most of the reason for not getting them replaced again. The new ones definitely breathe better and don't cause me trouble.)
A few months ago I decided to see if they'd worked out the kinks and got a new pair of Gen 2 ones. Those have been working pretty much flawlessly