Apple's AirPods Pro hearing health features

Yes, and protect your hearing while you can. Turn down your tunes.

Disclosure: Working musician. I wear musician's earplugs when playing in bands.

Totally agree but there's a small caveat...

Everybody has vastly different sensitivities to sound exposure.

Even identical twins with identical sound exposures can have drastically different hearing profiles especially as they age.

I actually have always been very careful with my hearing; there is some evidence that I may have a very very mild congenital birth defect that makes me prone to hearing loss, but that's largely speculation.

My wife is actually older than me and has a spectacularly sensitive hearing - as does her mother! - and she's the drummer! (The wife, not her mother :-) I just do keys and vocals...)

That's why it's so important that everyone protect their hearing because even though it's not too loud for the people around you, it might be too loud for you - and you won't know until it's too late.

> I wear musician's earplugs when playing in bands.

As a musician, you possibly have custom ones, but for anyone else who’s not an audiophile, you can get decent ones that mostly preserve the sound while lowering the volume for around $15-20. A godsend for concerts.

I shoot live concerts as a hobby and it blows my mind that I’m the only one in the media pit with hearing protection.

My Apple Watch is screaming at me that its damaging levels of audio, and I can’t imagine listening to the show without protection.

I actually just use the Etymotic ER20's. I'd rather have cheaper ones that I can afford to lose, and also have a pair in each instrument case.

Yes, +1 for etymotic. I’ve used them for years.

Hearing being a "logarithmic" sense and decibels make this a bit weird to me. Like losing 6 dB of hearing in a car crash is considered negligible and insignificant, but that actually means the ears lost half their sensitivity in a flash (and it's never coming back, just like teeth). Likewise your 50 dB hearing loss is considered moderate, but actually represents a 300-fold reduction in acuity.

> A godsend for concerts.

Maybe necessary for movie theatres too. Contemporary volume levels are abusive (imo).

Are they ever. I watched Alien Romulus in Imax, I'm not doing that again, it was painfully loud. I am an avid concert goer and I wear earplugs every time - Romulus without earplugs was by far the loudest thing I've been exposed to this year.

And, if you can't afford those, just get some orange foam ones - they have excellent protection, often greater than the audiophile ones, and, let's be honest, that bar or arena you're going to wasn't built with sound quality in mind.

Exactly!

Although I try not to think about that too hard because... well it's kind of depressing.

But it's the exact reason that hearing aids are so difficult to design.

For example if you were to naïvely try to just "add back" 50 dB of gain to a 70 dB ambient sound, that hearing aid would be trying to pump 120 dB of sound energy into your ear canal... which would actually cause damage to the surrounding cochlear bands...

But if it doesn't try to add something there, then everything sounds distorted because you have way too much sound energy from the other frequency bands, perhaps ones where you have much higher sensitivity.

Hence the multi band compression and why it's so difficult, and why hearing aid manufacturers focus on speech intelligibility above and beyond everything.

Personally, also at the very cheap end, I like wax ones partly because you can vary the noise blocking as needed - put them in loosely or squish them in.

I'm past the edit window here, but have a couple more thoughts. First, I'm just a jazz player, so my gigs can get loud, but not screaming stooopid loud. Second, I am almost always amplified on stage, meaning that the most delicate subtleties of optimal tone quality are lost anyway.

Many of the rock players are moving to in-ear monitors, which block everything but replace it with your monitor mix, received via wireless.

On the other hand, some band mates, and my kids, play classical. Their needs are a lot more critical in terms of perceiving their tone quality. A benefit of the fitted plugs is that you can get the capsules with less attenuation, which means you're still safe in something like a classical ensemble, but without losing too much.

When I go to rock concerts I am the one percent, when I go to bass music shows all of a sudden half of the people are wearing ear protection. I think some scenes and genres are better about this than others.

Under $20, nice: https://www.etymotic.com/product/etyplugs-high-fidelity-earp...

I mean, if you go to a concert and don’t really care about the music, sure. The sound will suck, far worse than just a venue’s subpar sound system.

Depends on the music. Metal shows are pretty much designed for treble-killing earplugs these days.

I guess that depends on the metal show, because I wholeheartedly disagree. But except kanonenfieber currently, I like little that is close to mainstream.

Haha, I'm the opposite, if I _don't_ have to wear earplugs I'm suspicious