[SkyPuncher]

> It's as if my ear is trying to compensate for the lack of sound.

Holy crap. You just blew my mind. "Silence is deafening" makes more than just figurative sense.

From a young age, I've always noticed a light ringing while in extremely quiet places. Not enough to bother me, but enough to notice my ears straining to hear sound.

[cevn]

I hear it right now. Doesn't everyone?

[xvector]

Nope, that's tinnitus. But it's a fairly common condition.

[pas]

What's the typical onset? (Since I remember <10 years old, I heard some noise and just accepted it as amplifier-like-no-signal-noise, even though regular hearing tests measured above average hearing. Though they don't cover the whole audible spectrum usually :/)

[xvector]

Same for me. Remember the noise since I was a small child. Always thought it was normal. Hearing tests consistently come back perfect.

But yeah, hearing tests cover a very tiny portion of the spectrum. Audiology, in this regards, seems to be completely divorced from the frequencies people hear in real life. In reality, the vast majority of hearing tests barely cover the frequency range of human voice - let alone frequency ranges for music or even tinnitus.

I asked my audiologist if it might be possible to cover a wider range of frequencies and she seemed flabbergasted that someone would even request such a thing.

So, yeah. If you have tinnitus, or music isn't sounding as nice to you anymore, or for some reason bass frequencies sound off - well, you won't find out with a traditional hearing test.

[antognini]

I'm not exactly sure which tests you've gotten. It may be the case that the audiologist will only test a few frequencies for someone who is likely to have good hearing. But if you are fitted for hearing aids they will test a range of frequencies from 100 Hz to 8000 Hz.

Almost all cases of hearing loss have hearing loss at high frequencies, so they may be able to screen you by just checking at higher frequencies. As far as I know, losing bass frequencies first only comes from specific conditions like Meniere's disease.

[pas]

8K seems too low. Sure at 20K you wouldn't hear anything, but there's still a lot of potential to hear a low level hum at let's say 13K which drives you mad.

[wildrhythms]

Were you ever in a school band? I was in every band class the school offered from grade 6 thru 12 and I attribute my tinnitus to constant loud instruments every day in those enclosed spaces. Four of those years I sat directly in front of the percussion section in a tiered seating layout, where my ears were exposed to snare drum and cymbals from mere feet away. I have constant ringing in both ears... fortunately it isn’t debilitating for me. I hope awareness around ear protection continues to grow.

[cevn]

My experience as well

[hluska]

I’m not sure how old you are, but can 42 year old me give you some advice? Go get a hearing test. If I would have known about my tinnitus at 22, I would have a noticeably higher quality of life at 42...

[astrodust]

Why? What would they do?

[hluska]

I would stopped damaging my hearing almost a decade before I did.

[idonotknowwhy]

I know I have tinnitus in one ear, it happened at a nightclub when I stood to close to a speaker. This was 10 years ago.

I'm perfectly happy with my condition, it's not getting worse and it's not preventing me from doing anything day to day.

What good would getting my hearing tested now do me in the future?

[hluska]

Had I known more about my condition, I could have saved my ears from nearly a decade of damage.

[cevn]

It's not really that bad, I only notice it when there is no other sound, then I can notice the high pitched ringing very clearly..

[dicknuckle]

My office has plenty of hum and hiss, so no.

[bdamm]

This is exactly my problem as well. How would I actually be able to differentiate high pitches (which I hear constantly) from noisy electronics and power supplies? The times where I'm out in deep nature with utter quiet (e.g. no airplane flying overhead at 30,000 feet) is so rare that I couldn't say I'd achieved homeostasis with silence. So really I spend 99% of my life in near proximity (within 30') of some cheap electronics that could very well be the source of this constant high pitch background noise. Or it's me.

[falcolas]

Ear plugs. If you can drop the surrounding noise by 35+db, you'll notice what's tinnitus and what's ambient noise.

Funny story related to this question, one day in a conference room I thought my tinnitus was just particularly bad, until someone went and turned off some unused AV equipment. The pitch of the electronic noise was identical to my personal tinnitus (and different than someone else's - they commented that it wasn't the right pitch for them).

[hluska]

I have tinnitus and haven’t talked about this with other sufferers so this may just be me. But if I slowly plug and unplug my ears, the difference between tinnitus and all the background shit is obvious. The only way I can describe it is that the sound comes from a different place and when you change how your ear works, you can hear the differences between the sources. My hearing is awful so I really pray this anecdata is of no use to you.

[Karunamon]

Same.. this made it very difficult for me to get to sleep as a child. It only happens in extremely quiet places, no anomalies on a hearing test. Oddly enough, active noise cancelling doesn't cause it.