[hoggle]

At age 32 my hearing is apparently at the level of a 66 year old. I'm not much of a concert attender nor drug user so the only real explanation the doctor could give for my disappointing audiogram was my habit of regularly working with headphones on (I always took care of moderate volume, mind you).

I wasn't expecting this result at all, I actually thought my hearing was perfect but hearing loss starts at the highest frequencies and continues to the lower frequencies exponentially. The route towards "Sorry, what did you say?" doesn't take as long as you might suspect.

[kmfrk]

Earbuds can do that; the audio "sounds" low to you, but you're only perceiving the delta between the device volume and environment noise. That's why I stopped using earbuds; when I would put my hand to my earbuds, the volume would shoot up from isolating the environment noise, and I got an idea of how loud my device actually was.

I recommend noise-cancelling earphones, because they deal with the delta problem for the most part; but you can obviously still run into the problem of setting and forgetting the volume, which is fine for one thing but too loud for something else.

[kazinator]

Get a second opinion. Maybe they are trying to sell you on expensive hearing aids.

It's also possible you didn't ever have great hearing. (Do you have any "before" audiogram to compare against, from when you were a child?)

[drzaiusapelord]

Uh, seriously? Right now we have a huge public health issue with young people and hearing loss. It isn't some scam. Turns out the ipod/iphone revolution came with some external costs.

http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/one-billion-young...

"If a person takes a subway to go from one place to the other for half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the evening, and every day has to turn up the volume on his device because there is so much of noise of the train and everything around, and is listening to - let us say 100 db (decibels) for one hour every day, his hearing is going to get irreversibly damaged in a few years, in a couple of years time, for sure."

---

Instead of subway, replace that with loud open-plan office and instead of one hour per day, replace that with 8+ hours. I think we need to address hearing damage the same way we started addressing RSI in the office back in the 80s. There are a lot of people who have no idea how much they are damaging their ears.

[dominotw]

Thats crazy, I am sorry. Is the hearing loss irreversible ?

[paublyrne]

Hearing loss is indeed irreversible.

So take good care of your ears, don't be complacent. (I'm a drummer)

[sliverstorm]

Most hearing loss is