Clubbing and Concerts

I think about being exposed to loud (over 85db) sound as taking a scoop of ice cream from a bucket. If you leave a show/venue and your ears are ringing, you took a scoop from the bucket. You can do this for many years if you don’t take too many scoops, but one day you’ll hit the bottom of the bucket.

You can only tolerate sound above 85db for so long. The world is loud, especially the West tbh. I’ve been to many restaurants and bars (without a band/DJ) that are 90db and over…sometimes purely because of bad acoustics. If your ears haven’t been too beat up and are ’normal’, you can deal with this without thinking much about it. They’ll ring slightly after and you’ll be ‘ok’ the next day.

Most clubs/venues are at least 95db sustained. I’ve experiences peaks up to 107db since I’ve been tracking decibel levels.

How to deal with all this:

  1. Take breaks. Get out of the sound for a while and you’ll stress the hairs in your ears less. Find a place to get out of the sound. Venues that don’t let you chill somewhere at around 70db are setup poorly.

  2. If you’re screaming to talk to someone over a soundsystem you are messing up in two ways. Get off the dance floor with your convo and realize that if you’re screaming at each other over a loud soundsystem you’re doing even more damage than just rocking out.

One strategy for dealing with music using earplugs:

  1. Focus on the acts you really want to hear/see and use the less heavy-dut musicians earplugs for that act. If you’re going out for 6+ hours, you’ll be able to do this for a while (20s-30s maybe) but it’ll catch up after a while. If your ears are ringing when you leave, you did some damage.

  2. Use the strongest industrial foam ear plugs for the things you don’t care about hearing as much. I have yet to find ones that are stronger than 33 NRR. (Again. this is a drop fo 13 db from the overall level).