This is a joke that my wife and I, two older fogies in our early sixties, frequently make when some guy with a ridiculously loud car stereo pulls within 500 feet of us.

It is sad to think that a whole generation will be unable to appreciate good music by the time they are forty. Well, come to think of it, they can't appreciate good music now!

("Rock and Roll is here to stay;
it will never die;
it will always be that way;
but I don't know why;
I don't care what people say;
Rock and Roll is here to stay....")

I made the comment last night at the Duplicate Bridge club when some annoyingly loud car was thumping away out in the parking lot, and she said that she thought that bass was not as damaging to hearing as treble.

Got me thinking.

In electromagnetic radiation, higher frequencies contain more energy than lower ones. And I think that I read the same thing lately in my studies of Acoustics. (Been reading some of Olson and Marshall's books.)

Is it true that Mike.e might not really be deaf by the time he is 30?

Is it true that there is no justice in the world, and all these guys with their #$%^ $^@#$%-F@#$&*$ thumping noisy car stereos are not really going to go deaf any day now? (As opposed the the rock concert goers, for whom it is already too late.)

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) ;)

As far as frequency dependence on hearing damage goes, I've never heard that referenced. We have to go through an annual lecture on hearing protection and related OSHA matters, and all they ever mention is SPL (over 85 dB). They never mention spectrum at all.

What seems to dominate is rise time and peak level - a very loud impulse might permanently deafen you instantly, as opposed to a prolonged exposure to 100dB.

I suspect that prolonged exposure to a humongous woofer in the trunk might still get to you! (Mike, I hope you're a good sport, because, you gotta admit, that thing of yours is a bit extreme! :)

What causes hearing damage? Are the finer cilia torn off by a sudden peak?

I bought a sound pressure meter from RS a few months ago when I started getting interested in Acoustics (largely because of these discussions), and I was interested to find that if the spl is 100db near my speakers, that is more than enough for me sitting at my couch. (My speakers can go much louder than that.) I was also interested to do a sweep with a signal generator and find out that there is a fair amount of sound at frequencies that I cannot even hear. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, can it still make you deaf? :)

If the sound level is too high, they get squashed down flat(er) and don't rise back up to sway as they once did.

One time I read the assertion that horn speakers were all the rage in the 50's because of the returning WWII vets. They went to school on the GI Bill and got good jobs - jobs that afforded them the leisure and money to play with audio. But their hearing was very poor from all the gunfire and large bore weapons they were exposed to - hence the love of horns and high SPL with the available amplification.

Interestingly, Paul Klipsch developed the KHorn while working as a range officer and doing velocity testing on projectiles. He sold a lot of them to his fellow vets.

My sub is actualy quiet,some of my mates have cheap pioneer 12"s getting 130-140db in car,thats just silly,cos it sounds like a piece of distortion anyway!

Cheers!