I'm really beginning to think we are almost the same person. Dodgy eyes, dodgy ears :laughing:! I have horrid ears, I've thankfully only had one op though.

I practically committed harakiri on my ears the past two summers working as a landscaper. Instead of wearing protective earguards like you're supposed to, I wore headphones to mask noise from the equipment. And considering that the operating level is around 85-90 dB itself I really must have been punishing my ears.

My ears began PHYSICALLY HURTING towards the end of the summer and I would get these massive headaches after working. It wasn't until I connected two and two that I dropped the headphones but the tinnitus remained. Considering the damage I probably did to my ears I'm very fortunate to only have intermittent tinnitus. Though I can't play music - or do anything else - very loudly or it returns in full force.

I hear what sounds like white noise at a very high frequency when it's completely silent. I sometimes hear an actual tone, but it's not all the time. Sometimes it will start randomly, then fade off. But I always hear the white noise sound. It's not loud enough to be noticeable above anything except complete silence.

I like to think of it as my own personal useless dithering system. If there ever happens to be a technological breakthrough whereupon digital ear implants are used in place of the biological setup we have, then I won't have any problems after converting down to 16-bit. lol... (awkward geek moment)

As a note, hearing degradation occurs with ANY loud sound.

The reason high frequency sounds hurt more is because our ears have a resonant peak around 8/9KHz

The reason low range hearing damage occurs less quickly than high midrange damage, is because our ears sense sound in a spiral. The high frequency sounds are sensed towards the top of the ear canal and the low frequency sounds towards the end, but they must still pass over the part that senses high frequencies. So the high frequency sound part is battered to death by all the sound we hear, and the bass frequencies get off fairly lightly.

they make earplugs for a reasoooooon

and actually, loud bass freqs are more damaging to your ears. had to research it at uni

I definitely do. Fortunately it's usually only a problem after being exposed to high noise levels for prolonged periods of time.

Also a physical exam a while back revealed that I have scar tissue on both of my eardrums undoubtedly as a result of the horrendous decibel levels I've been exposed to through live monitor engineering. Despite this, I don't really think it's drastically affected my perceptible frequency range.

Never said they weren't, in fact my explanation goes some way to explaining WHY :P

I'm usually able to ignore an annoying sound (gives me the ability to read during lectures), as I've had my share of exercises having the Uni fire alarm lunched every time someone lights up a cig.
However, I try my best to keep my hearing ability at best, as I am studying to be a sound engineer. Though I'm pretty sure I'm not going to work in this technical domain, I still want to be able to. For now I only heard this sound in my ears once, when I was at this crappy gig that thought putting the speakers at maximum volume might make them sound somehow better, but it didn't. It just made my ears hurt, and that ringing really did make me sad, as it meant I was mourning the death of my little hair cells.

I'm sorry, I don't really care too much but why was an example made of this thread because of a misspelling on my part? was it really necessary to commondeer the thread and highlight the word in 9 or 10 different posts to prove a point that I had misspelled. Or has this been merged to a prior thread and I'm just being thick?

I can feel it starting to set in:(