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AirPods causing tinnitus?

discussions.apple.com

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Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#111

Post by throwaway049 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #84
llanowarelves wrote: post #57

Hearing loss is very serious. You know your body better than anyone else so don't be afraid to be its biggest advocate and protector. Nobody else will. I once had tinnitus for a week after a concert and it was one of the worst weeks of my life, it felt like it would last forever (and for some people, it does). I had pristine, "golden ears" for audio engineering and was afraid about how much I'd be able to recover. I…

> I once had tinnitus for a week after a concert This is impossible for me. As a self proclaimed hypersensitive person with hyperacusis and misophonia, I would rather fight and claw my way out of any kind of concert or disco rather than suffering from the loud noises. Any kind of concert or disco noise means intense pain to me. Like getting stabbed in the ears. I found a solution and peace in ear plugs, with them I c…

Most people don't feel pain at the concert and they only notice the tinnitus the following day.

I used to go to thrash punk gigs years ago - but not many so didn't do noticeable damage before I learned about the risk and started wearing ear plugs.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#112

Post by bornfreddy »

This is my biggest reservation against using (any) noise cancelling headphones.

IIUC, they work by emitting the same frequency sound, a bit delayed, which cancels the sound in the targeted place - but doubles its amplitude in vicinity, because this is how waves work (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

I can't imagine being blasted with a loud sound in the vicinity of our hearing organs is very healthy. Instead, I just use those big headphones that cover my ears and dampen surrounding sounds somewhat. They're not stylish though.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#113

Post by thenerdhead »

AirPods may contribute to it, but we did just go through a few years of excessive emotional stress, a virus known to do all sorts of strange stuff, and used our wearable devices much more often.

Don’t just blame the AirPods in other words.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#114

Post by itsmartapuntocm »

fwlr wrote: post #98

Lifelong tinnitus sufferer here. The prevailing theory (edit: this is misleading, it is not the “prevailing theory”, I typed that without thinking. It is actually a new-ish/fringe-ish alternative to the actual prevailing theory of accumulated damage to ear fibers): The theory I subscribe to is that tinnitus is a breakdown of the ears’ and/or brain’s noise filtering and suppression mechanisms. Long-term use of white n…

Took me a long time to get over mine when I first got it. I think white noise, while a helpful temporary distraction, does ultimately become a crutch. Ultimately what helped me get over it was just letting myself hear it and ultimately making peace with it.

It’s kind of ironic in that the “cure” is to train your brain to stop seeing as a threat the noise that it’s generating itself.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#116

Post by Terretta »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108

Keep in mind that Apple sells around 100 million sets of AirPods per year: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/05/airpods-pro-2-sales/ At this scale, it's nearly impossible to separate coincidence from causality in scattered anecdotes.

And all of them used with current iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS offer default volume limits and proactive notifications about excess decibels, set quite low, and iPhones themselves offer environmental volume warnings as well now.

To get hearing damage generally requires disabling or raising levels on this feature not on offer from most players+headsets.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#117

Post by fwlr »

mdmglr wrote: post #109
fwlr wrote: post #98

Lifelong tinnitus sufferer here. The prevailing theory (edit: this is misleading, it is not the “prevailing theory”, I typed that without thinking. It is actually a new-ish/fringe-ish alternative to the actual prevailing theory of accumulated damage to ear fibers): The theory I subscribe to is that tinnitus is a breakdown of the ears’ and/or brain’s noise filtering and suppression mechanisms. Long-term use of white n…

My ENT recommended white noise long term especially for sleeping which I’ve been using for months. Based on everything I’ve googled the last few months this is the first time I’m reading the claim that “ breakdown of the ears’ and/or brain’s noise filtering and suppression mechanisms.” so I’m a little skeptical in what you are saying. My understanding is that tinnitus is the damage to the hairs in the cochlea. Which…

I’m not a doctor and your ENT is, you should listen to them and not me. I shouldn’t have said “Prevailing theory”, that gives the wrong impression. Makes it seem like “this is what doctors think” when it’s actually just what I think. I’ll edit that.

I did have a semi-automated method for causing those noise jumps, I’ll see if I can find it for you. Well, I looked, and can’t find it. It’s on a lost machine. One should always keep backups, but one rarely does. I do recall the basic structure of my solution, it was a kludge job with an AppleScript that set system volume to a random amount and a shell script that slept a random number of seconds, ran the AppleScript, and ran itself again. I vaguely recall it was hard to find programmatic system-wide equalizer settings but that may be different now, and it may be different in Linux/Windows too. It was not a comfortable experience, it definitely made listening to music into an exercise like running on a treadmill, but subjectively it was very helpful. I do recall getting the idea for this from reading medical literature on hyperacusis, so theoretically there might be some scientific support for it, but I have no citations to give.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#118

Post by makk »

a-dub wrote: post #48
garyfirestorm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummmm. ANC attenuates certain frequencies and fails to attenuate other frequencies. Which you would end up hearing anyway if you weren’t wearing the headphones. So effectively the sound power reaching your ears didn’t change for those frequencies. I have worked on ANC systems in automotive applications.

theoretically. it's never going to match the input exactly though and therefore it will generate noise of its own. it's conceivable that there would be less variation in this noise, due to quantized nature of the system that synthesizes the cancellation, and that a fixed synthesized signal for long durations could exhaust parts of the cochlea that are used to the high variability of natural sounds and/or trigger an a…

Thank you. I would love for someone go down this rabbit hole and see what they find. Maybe it turns out the answer is "none of the above" but these feel like productive lines of inquiry.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#119

Post by karlding »

I don't own AirPods, but one of the things that I've struggled with after the proliferation of headphone jack removal is that on all the Bluetooth headphones/earbuds I've tried the lowest volume setting is still too loud. I normally use Shure SE215s wired, but I've tried the Sennheiser PXC550, Sony WH-1000XM3, Jabra Elite 7 Sport with similar impressions, and tried using my work 2021 MacBook Pro as the audio source instead of my phone. Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way?

On my Samsung phone, I've had to manually set individual app volumes to 80% via Sound Assistant, have additional volume steps enabled, and have the system sound set to the lowest setting when using Bluetooth.

Re: AirPods causing tinnitus?

#120

Post by Traubenfuchs »

hn92726819 wrote: post #103
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I once had tinnitus for a week after a concert This is impossible for me. As a self proclaimed hypersensitive person with hyperacusis and misophonia, I would rather fight and claw my way out of any kind of concert or disco rather than suffering from the loud noises. Any kind of concert or disco noise means intense pain to me. Like getting stabbed in the ears. I found a solution and peace in ear plugs, with them I c…

I'm the exact same way. I assume our brain translates loud noises into physical side effects while normal brains just don't. Same way anxiety, or an anxiety disorder, can cause physical effects like sweating or increased heart rates when having symptoms. Personally, I like it because I worry about hearing loss and it's a kind of protective measure, while other people don't seem to care when they're damaging their ear…

Yes, yes, I prefer having this warning mechanism over not having it. I keep ear plugs in all my pockets, you never know when you end up in clearly harmfully loud environments even if it‘s just walking past a jackhammer.

I can not even imagine what normal people experience and feel at that point where noise and loudness turn into PURE PAIN for me. The accoustic equivalent of looking into the sun or lasers!

I also use airpod pros as alternative to earplugs and I do feel the ANC pressure and weirdness, but it doesn‘t feel painful in any way.

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