Ear Safety

If a long and successful audio career is your goal, you must protect your ears against loud decibel levels

Prolonged exposure to excessive noise levels – either in loud environments, or by playing headphones or speakers too loud – can easily result in permanent damage to the hair cells in the cochlea, causing hearing loss, tinnitus and other hearing-related ailments that will ruin your enjoyment of music.

The solution is simple: keep headphones and speakers at a moderate level, and wear ear protection any time you’re in an environment with loud music playing, no matter how small the venue. We’re big fans of Flare Audio’s Isolate earplugs, but any ear protection is better than nothing, so don’t worry about wearing some free foam ’plugs if you need to.

Ear protection isn’t a particularly cool or trendy topic, but it’s much better to think about this now than to potentially ruin a musicmaking or DJ career through ear damage. Here, we’ll show you how to test the frequency response of your ears using SoundGym’s Ear Doctor test.

This SoundGym Ear Doctor test requires the use of high-quality headphones in a quiet listening environment. To calibrate listening levels, the program plays some white noise, then asks you to turn up the headphone volume from silence, until you reach...

Once the noise tone is calibrated to our listening level, hit Start Hearing Test. Now, a high frequency tone is played through the left ear only, and sweeps down in pitch. You’re asked to press the Left Ear button as soon as you can hear the tone. Once...

The highest frequency our test subject – a 30-year-old producer/DJ – can hear in his left ear is just under 16kHz, but the right ear reaches almost 16.5kHz. These results aren’t that bad, but the slight imbalance between ears could be attributed to...