[78-L] A doubt about EQ curves

[Michael Biel]

From: Jeff Lichtman <jeff at swazoo.com>
> Loss of hearing in the high frequencies happens to almost everyone, 
> but you can minimize it by limiting exposure to loud noises.

It is not just high frequencies, it often is low mid-range -- right in
the middle of the range needed to understand speech.  That is what nerve
deafness is.  People speaking are audible to you -- you can hear them --
they are just not intelligible.  The addition of noise such as when you
are in a crowded room, riding in a car -- or background music in a film
or musical accompaniment in a performance -- can make it that much more
difficult to understand speech you can hear.

So just because you can still hear high frequencies such as horizontal
deflection in cathode ray tube TVs doesn't mean you have not had hearing
loss in frequencies LOWER than that.

I KNOW my hearing is bad now, but it used to be fantastic.  I could hear
a TV's horizontal deflection 100 feet away around a corner.  But I have
had tinnitus since an ear infection, and mechanical fuzziness since an
accident (a sound effects guy shot a gun two inches away from one of my
microphones while I was wearing headphones -- the shithead.  He had
probably already deafened himself decades ago with those goddamn guns. 
Last year another idiot sound effects clod just walked into a room and
shot off a gun without telling anybody he was going to do it.  I yelled
at him for 15 minutes and tried my best to get him thrown out, but he
will never shoot off a sound effects gun anywhere again for any purpose.
 There are better ways to get gunshot effects.)  

Some people are genetically more prone to hearing problems.  How
were/are your parents' and siblings' hearing.  My father had severe
nerve deafness from decades owning a yarn factory with criminally loud
machines.  My mother wasn't far behind, and my sister has worn hearing
aids for 20 years and she is just 3 1/2 years older than me.  My
daughter ALWAYS wears hearing protection at concerts and tries to
remember to do it in the subway.  She knows she walks out of concerts
being the only one who can hear.

RECORDEING STUDIO CONTROL ROOMS ARE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEARING.  As the
day and evening goes on, the monitor volume goes up and up and up.  If
you come in the next day with the settings the same, the first thing
anyone does is reach for the monitor level pot and turn it down.  Same
thing in your car, right?!  If your SPL in your control room is 95 dB or
above, you are screwed.

Getting hearing tests is not always helpful for learning your high
frequency limits because most testing is for intelligibility, not
audibility, and they rarely test above 8 KHz.  You have to ask for
higher frequency testing, and sometimes their equipment cannot really do
it properly.  

As my pal George Blacker's hearing deteriorated he became very
depressed.  Fortunately he talked about it to others and did not keep it
bottled in.  Sorta like I am doing now.

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com