AirPods causing tinnitus?

Given my 30-year history of tinnitus, I'm very careful about volume levels and I am certain that "too loud, too long" is not the thing that's made things worse for me.

The only thing that changed is I started using AirPods, specifically the Max.

I immediately noticed, when I first put them on, that I could hear better with them on and in transparency mode than I could with without them. A clue that they were cleaning up and/or amplifying something.

I had no apparent problems for a few months but then started to notice that it seems liked my tinnitus was getting worse. Unfortunately for me, I didn't immediately do anything about that observation.

Then, one day, I was in the kitchen with them on in transparency mode. Listening to nothing at all. I knocked a cast iron skillet against the stove. The pain in my left ear was instantaneous. It was like a gunshot. I took the headphones off immediately. Although there was no pain in my right ear, the increased ringing in it was intense and has only subsided slightly in the weeks since then.

For weeks, the ringing was so loud that it was waking my from sleep. I couldn't drop into meditation -- as a meditation practitioner, I'm checking in with my internal experience daily, so this change was profound.

I had to go on medication to aid with sleep and anxiety.

I've regained a hold on my sanity and come to grips with the reality that my ears are never going back to my normal level of tinnitus.

Upon a web search, I found the link I've provided, with more than 2000 people upvoting the topic on Apple's discussion site. Reading through the subjective experiences reported by many people there, it certainly seems like something is going on.

I'm posting here because I was talking to a friend about his experience with AirPods that have the noise cancelling and transparency features, and he experienced tinnitus as well with his Pro and Max models. He's one of the smartest people I know, so when he was reporting the same thing that I experienced, that so many other people are reporting, I became concerned that there may be a widespread issue.

Fortunately for him, the moment he started to get ringing he thought about it and disabled both transparency and noise cancellation. So, he switched to using them as plain old headphones, basically. His tinnitus wasn't permanent and he hasn't had problems since he made that adjustment.

He's a physics guy and his hunch is that there's something going on with harmonics and the powered modes of the headphones, that we can't hear, that is screwing up our ears.

I saw an ear doctor last week. He gave me a hearing test and was confused by what he saw (apparent across-the-board hearing loss in the left year; above and below average hearing in the right ear across the spectrum). He shrugged at my questions about certain kinds of headphones causing tinnitus.

What is the experience of the HN community? Does anyone have insights into what might be going wrong here?

But I can definitely say I do not have tinnitus despite wearing AirPod Maxes quite often.