Protect your ears

[Uncle E]

Do you have it on both ears? Or on "only" one?
An for how many years now? That really sucks. I am sorry for you

I hear it in both ears but much worse on the left. I attribute it to monitoring in my left ear when I was a DJ.

[revvy]

Ah yes indeed, what we need is a bit of unsubstantiated 'medical' bollocks.

For my part, I ate chives a lot as a kid and now have pretty bad tinnitus. So, go figure.

Did your comment refer to the post above?

In a jokey way, yes.

FTR I suffer from tinnitus due to an excess of listening to loud music.

Tinnitus threads are a total downer lol.

[Uncle E]

Sleep is the only time the tinnitus really bothers me. I use one of those headphone eye masks to drown out the ringing, plus take plenty of magnesium, glycine, l-theanine, and melatonin (trying to wean myself off the melatonin by taking an elephant tranquilizing amount of l-theanine).

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Tinnitus blows. I have quite a bit of ringing on a regular basis.

Sleeping with a box fan on in the room helps drown out the noise at night.

Being in my early-mid 40s, I find blasting music way less enjoyable than I used to, so hopefully that'll prevent further damage. But active noise cancelling headphones are another game changer. So often I was cranking up music to drown out background noise. At least with headphones, ANC has kind of solved that problem.

[osiris]

I have tinnitus but it's from TMJ. A pop of the jaw makes it go away.

[kritikon]

Tinnitus here, fortunately only in one ear and not that bad that it interferes with music etc. Pretty sure it was through loudness abuse in years gone by. One thing I can state for sure is that loudness makes the tinnitus worse. Usually I'm good with wearing ear defenders when using power tools etc but on the odd occasion I forget, it's hugely noticeable that the tinnitus cranks up by several factors if I use a power saw, drill, sander etc even for relatively short bursts and it takes quite a while to subside. An old noisy hoover used to make it worse too. I still use headphones occasionally but very careful with the levels, same with music - rarely loud and TBH mixing tends to be better at lower volumes anyway.

Some of the YT vids etc are quite dangerous - I see shite about worrying that 250ohm cans can't be cranked up loud enough etc. Shouldn't be that loud to start with. We all do the loud thing when we're younger - but I wish I had seen sense a bit sooner.

Now...does wanking make you blind? My eyesight is -4 already. And doubly dangerous if your hearing is impaired so that you don't know how loudly you're wanking...

[Uncle E]

It doesn’t make you blind.

[Milkman]

Im 48, and Ive had perfect hearing... until about 3-4 years ago after getting COVID one time. Ive only been to a small number of live shows in my life (less than 5 due to being a full time single dad, and these werent large venues), and Ive always gently cleaned wax, been careful with headphone and IEM volumes, and just generally been careful.

Then we got sick early 2020, and the main symptoms lasted about 5 months on and off. After that, I developed serious vertigo, taste and smell issues, saliva and tears dried up, etc, and my ears started ringing and "whooshing". I have a hard time using anything but open-back headphones that are not too sibilant, and I keep the stereos at a reasonable volume. Closed back, high pressure, sibilant headphones or IEMs cause me a lot of discomfort and my ears... distort in a weird way, dampening some of the sound.

Wear ear protection, for sure, and WEAR A MASK when in crowds. My immune-compromised, hearing-dampened family appreciates it.

[mjolnir]

I spent a lot of the past 6-17 years homeless. I never gave up on making music, but I had to survive sometimes by sleeping in some really loud places both inside and outside. It messed up my ears a bit, and I already had some hearing damage from riding the train to class in downtown Chicago and mixing for too many hours.

Two things I've learned:

1) sleep with high grade earplugs in. an audiologist teacher taught my class that hearing system needs sleep just like eyes and body
2) if you're mixing and you'are about to turn up the volume, you actually need to turn it DOWN instead. the audiologist teacher taught our class that hearing is more accurate at lower levels so you can mix better at lower volumes than higher volumes and get better results than fighting the Fletcher-Munson curve. Thanks teacher

WORD.