Hi all,
I thought I’d share how I seem to have damaged my hearing and increased my tinnitus this summer with the HD6XX over about 3 weeks of use.
Hopefully it may serve as a cautionary tale that would prevent someone else from having a similar experience.
I’d had very minor tinnitus for about a year before this whole thing happened. It didn’t bother me and because I thought it had come from workplace noise and I’d never been one to play music very loud.
At the start of July I bought the 6XX and ended up with an atom amp and DAC, and also with a zen Can off eBay.
I expected to resell the least preferred amp.
In the first week I used the atom amp and basically had no problems. It sounded good. I used my phone app to make sure it was listening at around 70db and I tended to have the amp at 10 o clock.
In the second week I used the zen Can and found that it sounded better but seemed to cause strange ear discomfort, which sometimes felt like eardrum tightness or a pinprick.
Its all a bit fuzzy now but I think I still listened to them quite a bit, but sporadically because of these sensations. I wasn’t sure if this is what people describe as a fatiguing sound but that didn’t sound right because the 6XX is meant to be a very non-fatiguing.
On the third week I was probably switching back and forth between amps but one day I put the headphones down and my ears were feeling pretty bad. I put in some true wireless earbuds and went on to do something else while listening to a podcast or something. Well the strange thing that happened was my right ear started hurting really quite a lot. I took the buds out and noticed the tinnitus was slightly louder in that ear. I still thought no big deal but decided to pack away the headphones to give my ears a rest which feeling quite sore.
At this point I realized the whole audiophile thing was not worth the hassle and decided to sell the headphones, amps and DAC.
After this my ears stayed sore for quite a few weeks. I went to the doctor around the middle of August, so about three weeks after I’d gotten rid of the headphones.
This doctor said I had a retracted eardrum and my eustachian tubes were sore, and he put this down to seasonal allergies and that the headphones were a red herring. I sort of thought fair enough and my ears stopped hurting by inhaling menthol and steam.
The thing is by early September the tinnitus was bothering me quite a lot more than it had before. It was clearly much louder than it had been in June. Loud enough to be noticeable day to day and very distracting in a quiet room.
So I’m here at the start of October and this tinnitus is causing me a huge amount of worry.
However, the important thing is to document this and warn others so that someone else might avoid the same experience.
It’s a mystery to me how this happened.
One scenario might be that I had the volume much higher than I realized as the lack of distortion tricks your brain into thinking it’s not as loud. In this case I damaged my hearing the old fashioned way.
Another might be that the quite excessive listener fatigue caused the problem.
The Wikipedia page of listening fatigue states that it causes less blood to flow to the cochlea hair cells which can kill them, but I’m unsure if this listener fatigue is the same thing that audiophiles describe as fatiguing. It also seems to me that the article is talking more about when your sound becomes muffled when you walk out of a concert, and this is definitely not the experience I had using the headphones. Listener fatigue - Wikipedia
So that’s the story.
If you get any kind of pain in the ear when listening to music with a new piece of equipment, stop.
It’s not in your imagination.
And maybe listening fatigue is actually really dangerous?
I’d also be interested if anyone has any ideas about the listener fatigue hypothesis. Its so strange that whatever happened to my ears caused my eustachian tubes to get inflamed and it sucked my eardrums into my middle ear.
Cheers.
