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Does Speaker Distortion Exacerbate Tinnitus? . . .
I am discovering a relationship to this as I age.
Small speakers (2 way particularly) in a lively (reflective room) causes my Tinnitus to flare up instantly whereas being in a more dead (damped) listening environment with the same music played at the same levels on larger speakers (less cone travel/lower distortion) causes NO tinnitus flare-ups and I enjoy listening much more - and subsequently spend way too much time standing in front of the speakers in the drumming room/basement rather than playing my drums.
Additionally, I find that highly compressed music (.MP3's) sound bad/raspy where uncompressed music does not seem to have this effect.
Comments
Many people will make the same conclusions, Tinnitus or not. Compression introduces/exacerbates all sorts of intermodulation, making the sound very “noisey”, having a lot more energy in the mid-high frequencies than would otherwise be there.
Maybe this is an unfair comparison, but I just ran a quick loopback test with a couple different files. One is the multiton generator from ARTA, saved at 24/96 WAV. The next is MP3 at 48kHz (mp3 doesn't support 96kHz), and variable bitrate of 170-210kbps, joint stereo encoding.
Difference of multitone spectrum is extreme.
I think higher frequencies make mine worse. It doesn't take much rock guitar to make them ring.
Ron
A spike in blood pressure or strenuous/stressful activity can do it for me, but my case is not that bad.
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Man as naughty as I have been to my ears in life... fortunately I have ZERO tinnitus. And my yearly hearing tests at work show I can still hear to 14k+. I've flown 100's of times for work (some long flights to Germany and Denmark), ran open header drag cars for decades, countless rock concerts with no ear plugs, and had tinnitus for 3 days after the loudest concert ever (Guns and Roses at a small venue back in Spring of 1988)... Wow I must be lucky.
Sorry Steve, can't help with your question. Just thought I'd add some color commentary
I can still hear up around 15k. Although I was not the best steward of my ears in my early 20's, I have been pretty diligent about hearing protection since. Mowing, woodworking, work in general, when I was running live sound I always used hearing protection.
Tinnitus is an occasional problem for me, but it generally only lasts for a few seconds and I can usually only hear it when laying in bed at night when all is quiet.
My left ear is pretty bad, right ear still good. I had a bad ear infection in the left side in my teens, caused some permanent damage it would appear, among listening to lots of blaring loud music in cheap tinny headphones, and plenty of live music over the years as well. Lots of things can make it worse, stress, dehydration, high sodium diet, alcohol, etc.
Looking at the mp3 multitone encoding visual above, there's quite the mess going on 3-8kHz right in the meat of the treble. But all at least 40dB down (<1%) from the fundamental, so maybe 60dB (0.1%) should be the new 40dB.
I think small speakers probably compress the music more, causing the average level to be higher.
Color and commentary here is excellent as it all adds to the electric lime green and spicy brown mustard graph lines offered by dcibel and his excellent attempt at showing the noise floor changes between good and bad audio compression techniques.
I knew I wasn't "hearing things" . . .
Which is why I am so enamored by 4 way speakers as each driver can play in a much more civilized manner (lower cone excursion) and remain within each of their respective pass-bands long before break-up gets noticeable . . .
For another electric lime and spicy mustard chart, I ran the same comparison with a highest quality possible 320kbps mp3, and the result of this simple multitone test is actually quite good. Still not a perfect representation of the original signal, but much less of that noisey mess from the variable bitrate file. So what does that tell us? 320kbps mp3 is good enough? There's probably better ways to evaluate file compression algorithms, this is just a readily available tool at my disposal.
^ That graph gives me reason to re-examine my .MP3 rendering settings on my DAW . . .
Thanks and best wishes, cousin.
Same graph as above, just cranked the gain up and zoomed in so you can see that the mp3 is still causing some noise over the original generator signal. At 20dB/div on the graph these are not insignificant differences.
Yeah!
And they are all in critical audio frequencies, too.
Especially at higher SPL's.
(I'm older and listen at reasonable levels these days but still hear pretty well).
Hey - thanks for putting in the effort to show us this data.
I use Cakewalk and usually render to 256 for mp3's and can definitely hear a difference compared to wav. But size wise is the reason I do mp3 for evaluations to friends.
Storage is cheap, for hifi use FLAC whenever possible.
I have over a terabyte of FLAC5 files at this point. I use Foobar to rip.
I also mirror my collection in 320K MP3, which admittedly is not a whole lot smaller than FLAC5 encoding - but when I copy a bunch of files to a thumbdrive for my parents or some of my friends or whatever, they don't get confused about what a FLAC file is.
I rip in my linux server (https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine) or use EAC in windows.
I still have a lot of old crappy mp3s.
That looks like a ton of effort to setup and maintain - I have a MINT box running as a back-up to my several Windows PC's but don't know much about Linux . . .
I am using REAPER which is Apple, Linux and Win compatible and will try Loading FLAC compression as an experiment soon - I like the file size reduction over .WAV renderings . . .
https://www.reaper.fm/
BTW, if this hobby isn't fun then it isn't a hobby - it is just work.
Experimentation while having fun (wonder what happens when cross the beams . . .) is how all the science got created - never stop experimenting.
Wahoo!