Your opinion on bad sound

The clipped, compressed sound may just flat-out have more RMS energy. (Hams do that deliberately to boost their transmitters' effective power.)

Your ear does contract a muscle to protect itself against impulse damage, but any noise that causes a reduced "threshold of hearing", like after flying in a jet, can cause permanent hearing loss. The amount varies with the amplitude, frequency, and duration.

Anything that causes your ears to ring *does* produce irreversible hearing loss each time you do it.

Clipping amps would produce more high harmonics, and yes, higher frequencies are more damaging to hearing.

Best way of improving the sound in clubs is wearing ear plugs. Then you can boost the signal (hence signal-to-noise ratio), without overloading your ears.

Cheers, James Arthur

Get married. That will stabilize your tinnitus ;-)

It's all that "Peak Music Power" ;-)

...Jim Thompson

also avoid the ultrasonic scalers at the dentist...

Mark

What have you got against baby seals?

Sometimes? Bring some earplugs. Then you'll hear exactly how terrible these sound systems really are.

A noble goal. I have a plan that will finally end the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. Let's work together.

Bob

When there are no survivors left on either side ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

Well, the band Chromeo is a Jew and an Arab working together to make some nice 80s style funky music. Their show was great, good sound and great opening act.

The ringing is ear damage - Tinitus. Bad for your ears and probably and caused permanent damage. Clipping causes harmonics which are harsh to the ear - in particular 3rd.

My family and I went to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra here at UCF arena last month. We were seated near the back, with about 4 rows and a concrete wall behind us. As soon as the show started I could tell it was pretty loud, louder than most concerts I had been to, even when in front of the speakers at those venues. The sound was actually distorted in my ears. I had to stuff some tissues in my ears and with or without the "ear plugs" the vocals were somewhat hard to hear. My wife and son endured it until at some point a female vocalist drove my wife to plug her ears as well.

I had to wonder why the sound engineer could not crank down the gain 4 to 6 decibels or so, perhaps he was "hard of hearing".

I put half a wax earplug in each ear so that people don't notice. I feel self-concious wearing yellow foam earplugs, unless I actually want to give the impression that I don't like the music.

I'v been in clubs with a goods sound and some with terrible sound. I once paid a stiff entrance fee to see Aphex Twin to sit at the front and press play on his laptop. I roughly estimate the bass was 40dB above the mid and trebble. My favourite track was halfway through before I even recognised it.

Bob

That's the real source of the problem. These "engineers" will suffer hearing loss eventually. Then, they start cranking it up and everone joins in the misery.

When I go to an amplified event, I use hearing protection. I just don't care how silly I look. It's not worth losing such a valuable sense.

Bob

i tend to agree with you; the ear can protect itself from high levels at low freqs by decoupling the incus and stapes with the stapedius muscle. but i also noted that distorted lound sound gives me ringing afterwards, whereas undistorted sound which seems louder doesn't; i don't have any evidence but i'm guessing that the decoupling is less effective on higher freqs. of course this would not be surprising evolutionarily; the body tends to be protected against things that our ancestors encountered but not things that they didn't; and high power high frequency long duration sounds are not something commonly found in nature, compared to high power low frequency long duration sounds.

The biggest distraction to good sound for me is, over abundance of the spectrum in the 1-3 Khz range. You can't have any peaking at all, in this range, on a GOOD set of speakers. Its the ears most sensitive region. A loss in this area often makes for even easier listening.

greg

Acts tend to hire young people to do their sound, as a distrust to anybody older. This usually results in, 1. recreational pharmaceutical style financing for sound guys. And 2. 48,000 watt speaker stacks driven stop to stop.

Before I worked for the university, I was in the laser show business and I was exposed to a third thing, deaf old stoner sound guys who have too much money from the practice of 1 above. One, doing a big show for a city riverfest, decided they needed 10,000 watt stacks ran off three phase every 200 or so feet to play Polka. A riot nearly happened as many angry people in tuxes and evening dresses thought those of us in the laser booth were the ones blasting them in a confined space with 5 kW of Frankie Yankovic polka. They ended up cutting one of the feedback cables (4 wire system) to the stack and that took it to full power and max distortion. Imagine 400 executives and their wives eating dinner on top of a 200 foot tall 4 lane bridge either trying to kill us, destroy the speakers, or run off the mile long bridge. Sound guy was two miles away and we were screaming on the radio to kill the audio, and of course he could NOT hear his radio. I finally turned down the breaker on the genny powering the bridge, terminating our site as well. The next night we had double fencing around the laser booth and our own sound feed. When confronted about the incident later, the sound guy said Whattttt? I cant hear you.

The next night hit hit me with 10 KW of white noise in revenge, while I was walking about 10 frofoot in of a stack. While doing that, he fired every site along the 2 mile event with white noise. At 11 Pm at night (3 day weekend event) that didnt make the apartment dwellers along the river very happy. My cowokers claimed they hear me scream in pain above the stack.

We had to have federal permits and eye exams to work with lasers, and we always thought that there should be a license, proof of common sense, insurance and and drug and hearing tests to own a speaker.

It is a real problem

Steve Roberts

Maybe your ears are going non-linear.

I avoid restaurants that have noisy bars.

...Jim Thompson

Besides aren't bars where you go to get HIV ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

Personally, music in dance clubs doesn't qualify as music, but that is another story.

skrev i meddelelsen news: snipped-for-privacy@t3g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...

Get a pair (or two) of the good-quality earplugs; they are designed to cut the high-frequency impulse noise that damage your hearing and one can hear speech at the same time!

A funny thing happened at a System Of A Down concert I took my teenage son to in Copenhagen:

The sound was absolutely perfect, EXACTLY at the right level - juust before "too loud" - with no tinitus or anything after; That was without the earplugs, which we had for backup. The concert was in a concrete & wood building! I.M.O with decent equipment and an really good sound crew it is absolutely possible to get good sound without the damage. Unfortunatley most clubs are run by thickos only to get the maximum profit on the bare minimum of expense and work.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Thompson" Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 8:14 PM Subject: Re: Your opinion on bad sound

They are logarithmic from the beginning.

Good Choice: Noise, both visual and audible is often used to divert sensory attention away from the swill the peddle for food. ;-)