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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I've always been someone who hears high pitched noises that "normal" people don't. I'm also in my 30s, and I'm sure those "teenage alarms" in Japan would work on me. I was the one who would walk up to a CRT and turn it off when everyone else thought it already was.

What helped me accept (and ignore) tinnitus was realizing that I had already grown accustomed to tolerating that sound indoors. When's it's something you have no agency over (like "it's an old house and the wires just make that sound sometimes"), you learn it's part of the environment.

Accepting it as part of the environment gets you past the "OMG my body is ruined forever" anxieties and back to normal life.

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By the way, that CRT squeel is the sound of the flyback transformer, which operates at 15.625 kHz for PAL and 15.734 kHz for NTSC sets.

This is so relatable, though it has a strange downside. I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember and always thought I was some superhuman child who could hear electricity. Didn't actually realize it was tinnitus until I heard it at the top of a mountain I was hiking in remote New Mexico a few years ago. I probably got it from chronic sinusitis as a child, but I'm still not sure what to make of it.

That's actually not tinnitus but (from what I've been told) cochloreal hyperacusis, another form of hearing damage.

I always have that, but I only hear a random high pitched tinnitus noise in one ear, rising and falling in volume for max 10 seconds, about once every few months.

I can still hear old CRTs in my forties, although it's less maddening now. They had those mosquito devices, that are intended to repel kids, for a while at a shopping mall near me. They repelled me very effectively as well.

A friend once thought it was funny to try the 15.000Hz silent ringtone on me, although I had told him not to. It made me react without conscious input and I nearly broke his phone.

> I always have that, but I only hear a random high pitched tinnitus noise in one ear, rising and falling in volume for max 10 seconds, about once every few months.

Holy crap! I'm not alone! And now I have a name for it. They've always freaked me out and I don't even know how to describe it to people.

I assumed everyone has that.. and that its the last output of a receptor dying.

I hope you're wrong but that's probably what it is :(

CRT's and coil whine used to drive me crazy as well. It was the number 1 factor in any electronics purchasing descision.

I only hear a random high pitched tinnitus noise in one ear, rising and falling in volume for max 10 seconds, about once every few months.

I get these, too. I just looked it up, and it's called "Sudden, brief, unilateral, tapering tinnitus (SBUTT)." That's quite an SEO-friendly name.

Funny I could hear CRTs too. In teens could hear faint high pitched noise in extremely quiet outdoor settings. Bad tinnitus 15 years later. Slowly reduced and I’m less conscious of it now.

huh. I could hear that noise as well and I have had tinnitus for 30 odd years.

I'm 73, had tinnitus all my life, I am used to it. Some days it seems louder than others. When I was 17-18 I worked as a stock boy at a JC Penney store. I used to hear this high pitched squeal near the front entrance. I mentioned it to my compatriots who responded "What squeal?" I always found a way to avoid the front entrance on my rounds. So yeah, I get the alarms

I heard older TVs being turned on and off as well as CRT monitors. Now, its that very range I 'hear' all the time. Part of me wonders if it was sensitivity to that spectrum that damaged my hearing when I was around multiple CRTs so much.

I have known people that have it much worse than I face daily.

Yeah, for me it sounds almost exactly like the squeal that CRT TVs make. Like, it's basically indistinguishable from that for me.

Me too!

I genuinely could hear CRTs when I was 5.

Tinnitus sound now is very similar for me too.

Hearing test showed high frequency hearing loss in that range which is well above human speech and a lot of music.

I have a (completely unscientific) theory that my tinnitus is a result of early exposure to CRT TV's and my brain trying to compensate for the noise. The reason I say that is that it's roughly in the same frequency band as the PAL horizontal refresh. It's been with me basically my whole life, since long before any real hearing damage would have set in anyway - I remember asking friends when I was 9 or 10 whether they could hear it too. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a window of opportunity when the brain is still plastic for these kind of "adaptations" to set in place.

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