Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally I've noticed that music at concerts and bars is not as loud as it was in the 1980s. I went to a Rolling Stones concert in the late 1980s and was practially deaf for several hours afterwards. Saw the Who like 10 years ago and it wasn't close to painfully loud. Don't see near as much live music in bars as I used to but it also seems to be turned down compared to what used to be done.

View on HN

I believe you, obviously. (I dont go to concerts myself, but pretty sure have tinnitus and misophonia)

But on a lighter note this _sounds_ like a setup for a joke that involves hearing loss from earlier experiences resulting in your hearing at less and less volume as time progresses.

This is exactly what I suspect is the problem with a lot of sound engineers, where over-loud top-end frequencies damage their ability to hear those sounds, leading to an escalating increase in the volume of those frequencies. I've been to venues where the top-end is literally painful to the point of having to leave, and I'm always baffled that nobody running the place seems to notice or care.

Saying that some venues do cheap out by over-loading the top-end to seem "loud" instead of spending more money on more expensive low- and mid-range speakers.

Anecdotally, I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, but I never really noticed until I had a permanent loud whistling sound in my ears after a concert in a smallish venue in Japan in the early 2000s, that thankfully dissipated after a few days. But it made me realize that, the residual "sound" remaining after that, I was actually hearing it before too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com