Gaming and Tinnitus: How Loud Is Too Loud?
3:32 · Read the full article
Chapters
- 0:00The footsteps
- 0:20The ringing is a report
- 0:47Why gaming is a worse risk than a concert
- 1:05What your ears are rated for
- 1:31It is a mixing problem, not a volume problem
- 2:07The setup that costs you nothing
- 2:38If the ringing is already there
- 3:08Stay in the game
Transcript
0:00The footsteps
You turned the volume up to hear the footsteps. Everybody does. Then the session ends, the headset comes off, and your ears are ringing. That ringing has a name. And it is not nothing. By the end of this you will know how loud your headset actually is, and how long you can play at that level. Plus the one audio setting that fixes the footstep problem without touching the volume.
0:20The ringing is a report
Tinnitus is not a disease. It is a symptom. Inside your ear sit thousands of microscopic hair cells that turn sound into signal. Think of them as blades of grass. Ordinary sound is a breeze. Eight hours of loud audio is a boot. Bent grass stands back up. Broken grass does not. Those cells do not grow back. So the ringing after a long session is not the damage. It is your ears reporting it.
0:47Why gaming is a worse risk than a concert
A concert is two hours and then it is over. A session can run eight. Three things stack up. How loud the game is. How long you sit in it. And headphones, which deliver all of it straight into the canal. A shooter averages around ninety decibels for as long as you are in it.
1:05What your ears are rated for
Safe listening is not a matter of taste. It is a weekly budget, and it collapses fast. Eighty decibels buys you forty hours. Eighty five, twelve and a half. Ninety two — an average shooter — two and a half. A loud concert, two and a half minutes. And a gunshot in game can peak at a hundred and nineteen decibels. That is not a session limit. That is a limit measured in seconds.
1:31It is a mixing problem, not a volume problem
You are not turning it up because you like it loud. You are turning it up because footsteps are mixed almost silent and gunfire is mixed deafening. So to hear the thing that wins the round, you swallow the thing that costs you your hearing. That is a mixing problem. And a mixing problem has a mixing fix. Footsteps too quiet to place. Gunshots peaking over a hundred. So you raise the master. With a compressor, footsteps lifted. Peaks held down. So the master comes back down. A compressor narrows the gap between the quietest sound and the loudest one. You hear more, at less.
2:07The setup that costs you nothing
Five changes, none of which cost you a single kill. Keep the master around sixty percent. Break every hour. Pull effects and music down, leave dialogue up. Add a compressor or a limiter. And use a closed-back headset with noise cancelling. That last one is the quiet win. Less noise leaking in means less volume needed to hear the same detail. And if you want a check with no meters: hold the headset at arm's length. If you can still hear it clearly, it is too loud.
2:38If the ringing is already there
Two things are worth knowing. It is common — somewhere between ten and twenty five percent of adults hear something. And the ringing itself does not make you deaf. Carrying on at the same volume is what does the rest. These are the ones to act on. It is new, or it will not settle. It is only in one ear. It came with hearing loss or dizziness. Or it is genuinely wearing you down. Any of those is a reason to see an audiologist. Not to panic. To get the cause named.
3:08Stay in the game
Your reflexes are not the thing that ages out of this hobby. Your hearing is. Master down. Dialogue up. Let the limiter do the shouting. Because you turned it up to hear the footsteps. You can hear them at sixty percent instead. If that was useful, subscribe for more videos like this one.
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