Anyone with tinnitus or hearing loss who is into "high-end" audio?

I have had tinnitus (no hearing loss under 6Khz) for 4 months and hyperacusis for a couple of years.  If you have either of these make sure you avoid high volume environments, or at least wear earplugs if you do.  You can get earplugs moulded to your ears with filters which take off between 10db to 30db yet do not interfere with the frequencies, so they are perfect for gigs.

I have got used to the tinnitus but to start with it sent me into a very low mental state which was very unpleasant.    The hyperacusis is more manageable though sadly I can no longer enjoy listening to my daughter play the piano - anything above middle C is painful.

The only time the tinnitus affects my music listening is in quiet passages where it sounds like a lot of tape hiss is coming through.

The hyperacusis meanwhile does make harsh top-end painful - it means I have moved from a rather brittle sounding Naim system to a velvet-like Vitus set up.

I'm an old timer, 75, and the fact that I worked in a steel mill for 36 years, {before hearing protection was popular}. Also I loved shooting, I did do hearing protection while doing that. Anyway doing all this, plus playing guitar and listening to rock and jazz, I've managed to pretty much destroy my hearing. When I went in the service, I was told I had much better than average hearing. Now I have tinnitus, and what I call, tone deafness. I have always had a love of music and the high end equipment to reproduce it.  So in order for me to do this now, I wear hearing aids when I want to relax and listen to The Rippingtons, or Steely Dan. But I have found that this tone deafness thing causes me to hear music actually go out of tune at times. Whether it is recorded, or live, and that's really frustrating because now I can no longer play music, or even tune my guitar. The best advice I can give anyone is wear hearing protection and just don't get old, it's not for sissies....

Mine is like the old fly back transformer whine in tube TVs. 

That's just what mine sounds like.   And having sensitive hearing I've always been able to hear that high pitch from a CRT TV immediately if one is in the vicinity.  Like, as soon as I'd walk in to someone's house, or in to a store, even if the sound was off that transformer whine was blazingly obvious to me.


BTW, there was a good thread we did when another member complained of hearing sensitivity, likely hyperacusis.


I had a wicked flair-up of my hyperacusis due to having an air-show - various jets - flying low overhead, and I've been treated for over a year now.  I was given tiny hearing-aid type devices that don't amplify sound but instead push a carefully modulated type of white noise in to my ears all day long to re-orient my auditory system.  Seems to have worked pretty well so far as most of my hyperacusis is gone.  (And of course I take them out to listen to music.  With the devices out my hearing is as good as ever).

Thanks to everyone for this informative and, frankly, somewhat reassuring thread.

Last summer, on a flight back to CA from Prague, I sat in front of a family with a continuously shrieking infant. The child must have been sick; a week after getting home, my wife and I came down with severe fevers and, in my case, an ear ache. Long story short: I suddenly lost almost all the hearing in my left ear.

My GP sent me to an ENT who "diagnosed" the condition as "sudden idiopathic hearing loss" (more a description than a diagnosis, in my opinion). Apparently, this strikes about 1 in 10,000 people annually, and--as "idiopathic" indicates--it has no known cause nor any known reliable treatment. There's high-dose steroids (e.g., prednisone) injected directly into the ear canal (no thanks!), and the experimental "hyperbaric oxygen" (risk, besides cost: bursting into flames; again, no thanks!), but otherwise, I was told not to expect any improvement.

However, my own impression was that there was congestion in my Eustachian tubes; sometimes, swallowing hard would partially clear the problem temporarily. Besides, I'd just had a severe congestive illness. Sorry, the ENT said; a hearing test through the bone showed the same results as through the ear canal, indicating cochlear nerve damage.

I'm happy to say that he was mostly wrong. After some months, the ear began to clear more frequently, and now, it's almost--not quite--back to normal. I don't think I'm deceiving myself because, when this was in crisis, I was adjusting the balance on my audio system far to the left to compensate; now, the balance is set almost back at center.

As for tinnitus, yes, there's some of that, too. I think most of us past 60 have some problem with tinnitus. It varies in intensity, as several here have noted, and one gets used to it.

What interests me primarily about all this, though, is something few have remarked on and that may in fact be sort of taboo among audiophiles: the importance of subjectivity in the experience of audio bliss. After all, if you want to convince someone else of the superiority of your system, or of this or that component or tweak, you have to appeal to "objective" facts. Your friend can't have a pain in your tooth, nor can he have your experience that grounds your enthusiasm (he...or she--but face it, the vast majority of us are hes, another subjective factor surely).

Age related hearing loss should wake us all up to this fundamental feature of human experience. We may want to validate our enthusiasms as objectively justified, but they rarely are. Objectively, few of us can hear, coming from our many thousands of dollars of audio equipment, what our children can hear from their iPods playing MP3s through earbuds.

I know this is depressing, and kind of heretical. But... 

had Tinnitus  long ago,,,not sure causes,,Stress? Loud radio listening?  Age? (I am 64, had it when i was like in my 50's for a  few months*),,,there is a chinese herb that seemed to work. But yeah, no car radio,,quiet time  in park, things like that. But like 4 yrs ago, when i worked as a  scaffold helper valero gave a surprise hearing test,,like i flunked the super high range,,,which all my coworkes laughed when i showed them by graph test results,,that i was *deaf*,,anyway,, no big deal..just the upper range of violins a  bit soft,,,
hope some of that helps ya
paul
Snakeoil buster all things\
Stereo
audiophile since 1970's
new orleans