MP3's (Audio Compression) may cause hearing loss and tinitus.

at least we can rely on the big Record Companies comissioning research on this....

 

sounds like the end of the world, but you cant go by anything off the internet these days.

 

lmao

 

No biggie. We'll just switch to Ogg Vorbis or get ultra-high speed DSL, thousand gigabyte hard drives and 3Ghz CPUs, and listen to everything in .wav format .

 

Sounded plausible in the beginning of the text, but then there was something paranoid about it that made me laugh. I think tin foil is in order to protect yourself against subliminal messages in compressed audio.

 

That was funny. In a sad sort of way.

 

I think there is something in this. I've talked to a few Jazz muscians about tinnitus and several have mentioned to me that eletric pianos can cause tinnitus - even when using supposedly high quality sound samples, in a way that acoustic piano never does.

I find that distorted high frequencies cause damage to my ears - whereas I can take any amount of volume, when it is very high quality, undistorted and bassy!

So I have been to clubs with very high qualuty sound systems and seen very loud bands with no apparent tinnitus or hearing loss - but I have been to small clubs with bands playing distorted guitar and felt my ears damaged at relatively low volumes after a short time.

I honestly believe after listening to music for 30 odd years that it is the quality of sound that damages your hearing, not volume. High quality bass sounds have no effect on my ears - but a few minutes of distorted guitar or electric piano starts my ears ringing!

 

I assume you mean electronic/digital pianos/keyboads, rather than electric pianos. Electric pianos implies things like Rhodes, Wurlitzers, Clavinets etc - to which this doesn't apply. And, IME, there are very few sampled piano sounds that are any good anyway. Even ones in top-of-the-range modules have a tendency to be crap IME. I know Yamaha do some very good sampled pianos in their higher end products, which I imagine are free from this problem.

 

as I understand it, ringing in the ears occurs when microscopic receptor hairs in the inner ear get jammed in their "on" state by excessive volume, permanently transmitting a nerve signal- presumably this must be in the high frequency region-
if excessively loud bass signals could cause this, wouldn't your ears be "booming" as opposed to "ringing" afterwards?

 

The concept that "sound you like won't hurt you" is a myth. Play loud enough and you get hearing damage. My theory is this myth came about because of a mixup of cause and effect - it's more likely it works the other way around, i.e. "you like a sound because it doesn't hurt you" (the level is low enough, and there are no harsh sounding frequency components).