Is listening daily at an average of 85db safe?

6550C,

As a grad student in the early 60s I worked at a research center set up to study the effects of noise on man. The work was funded by NIH grants. As a post doc I worked on binaural processing. I have not worked in psychoacoustics for more than 50 years, nor have I read the literature (JASA, etc.). Perhaps the auditory system has evolved since then or acoustic tricks have been invented that are beyond my time.

Although I have not claimed expertise in this field for at least 40 years, IIRC the auditory system pretty much responds to the acoustic events incident upon it. There are limits to temporal resolution, but we perceive acoustic events more or less as they occur.

By "ten dollar words" do you mean basilar membrane and hair cell, the mechanical precursors to the neural firings that are transmitted to the auditory cortex and perceived as sound

"Pro sound books" and "Audio magazines" ( assuming we are not referring to peer reviewed audiology journals) are not exactly the type of sources that should be relied upon for auditory health.

As long as the neighbors dont complain let it rip....its like I'm saving my hearing for what a rainy day....lol.

What?

"Are bass sounds less damaging?" Here ya go!

Given how the inner ear works, noise induced hearing loss generally occurs at the frequency of the noise. As the sound waves travel through the cochlea they undergo frequency dispersion. This means that a low frequency sound (bass) only "travels" the whole length of the cochlea all the way to the apex while high frequency sounds are transmitted only to the base. This means that low frequency sounds are slightly more "dangerous" to the inner ear than high frequency sounds.