[toomanybeersies]

Hearing ability and having an "ear" for sounds are two orthogonal skills.

My hearing is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I'm in my 20's and I have quite bad tinnitus from years of shooting rifles without proper hearing protection [1], using power tools without any hearing protection, and standing next to large speakers at nightclubs for 16 hours every weekend.

Recently I have actually started looking after my ears. I wear high quality earplugs any time I'm somewhere with loud noises.

Anyway, my hearing isn't exactly great, especially in higher frequencies. But I've still got an ear for sounds. Back when I was shooting I'd be able to tell different calibers apart. When listening to a song I'll be able to pick the different samples and instruments apart. I'm also fairly sensitive to how speakers or headphones have been EQed.

It's a bit of a curse really. I really struggle in nightclubs and at raves with poor quality speaker systems. I was at a nightclub a few weeks ago and I spent the whole night being bugged by how off the EQ was. If a club hasn't got its acoustics right and has sound bouncing off the back wall it really bugs me too.

[1] Even for a .22 you need hearing protection, even if your ears don't hurt, the high frequency impact will still damage your hearing. And for shooting hundreds of rounds with AR-15s, foam earplugs are not suitable.

[cm2187]

And I am in the opposite position. I can’t hear a voice in any noisy environment, even when everyone else seems to hear it fine. So I went to do some test and was told by the doctor that my hearing was absolutely fine, that it has to do with the ability of my brain to process sounds...

[elbasti]

West earplugs! I know this sounds counterintuitive but bear with me. This knowledge changed my life.

So, there is a deep misconception about what it is to "hear", even among doctors; perhaps this can help you.

A quick primer on how the ear works, in an eli5 way: in order to have a large dynamic range, all inner ear cells are "tuned" to be responsive at different volumes. (The response curve of any one cell is like an S, which means it is exquisitely tuned to a very narrow volume range. Anything quieter than this and the response is 0, anything higher and it saturates). Your brain then ignores anything that is "saturated". This allows you to hear both a cricket and a person talking next to you, sounds that are about 1000 times louder/quieter.

And your ear has a _lot_ of these cells, which together cover the entire volume range, which for humans is many orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately, when hearing gets "damaged", what happens is that the cells tuned for higher volumes are permanently saturated, _so the brain ignores them_.

The worse the damage, the lower the volumes that are stuck "open".

So then imagine being in a loud restaurant. The cells that fire for the volume of conversation are "saturated" so the brain ignores them, and all sounds are perceived as being equally "loud"--the world sounds muddled.

The solution, paradoxically, is to lower the volume of _everything_ (by wearing earplugs), which puts the conversion volumes back in the area where you have dynamic range remaining.

If you don't believe me, try it out by just covering your ears with your fingers next time you are at a restaurant--the conversation should be clearer.

Sidenote: the problem with hearing tests is that they test "the lowest volume you can perceive"--assuming that if you can hear a quiet thing, you can hear a loud one. But this isn't how hearing loss manifests itself among most people; we can hear quiet, we can hear loud, we just can't tell them apart!

[jorvi]

I have the same. I’m really bad at following a group conversation if we’re in a bar or something. However, if we ordered some take-out afterwards I can usually hear the scooter coming in from 1-2 streets away (through closed windows), I know 5 minutes beforehand if the DHL/mailman is coming because I can hear his beep gun one street over, etc.

It can actually get fairly annoying because if for example I’m crashing at someone’s place and the inactive speakers have a very faint hum/buzz, I can pick that up but the person I’d tell it to thinks I’m mad and am imagining things.

I also echo the parent post in that I often hear people’s EQ being bad and it can be a mild effort to not be an elitist snob and correct it for them / tell them its wrong. Hell, often if they allow me to either EQ it to neutral or V-shaped they still dislike it to their own settings (which is cool and at that point I just let it be).

[fouc]

I bet you can re-train the brain on how to hear for that. Could be you've trained the brain one way (maybe too much white noise exposure) and now you need to train it back.

[iscrewyou]

Exactly. I learned to find different instruments in songs by watching YouTube videos of producers putting a song together. Now it’s much easier for me to pick up that mellow instrument way way in the background of a hook.

[emptysea]

Do you have any recommendations for earplugs?

[toomanybeersies]

I'm using ETY plugs [1]. They took a little bit of getting used to, as they go quite far into your ear, but they're really good and comfortable to wear all day. They're quite cheap too.

They reduce enough sound that I can stand in front of a festival speaker stack for 6 hours and my hearing will be fine. Their sound reproduction is really good too, it doesn't mute the highs or make you feel like you're listening to everything underwater.

They guys at the shop said that they're not ideal if you're a performing musician or a DJ, and I'd agree with them, but if you're just on the dance floor they're great.

They also come with a string and a case so you don't lose them.

[1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/hearing-protection/er20.ht...