I recently asked our team of contributors for their advice on protecting hearing in the studio. The prize for best response has to go to William Wittman with “What?”. But joking aside we had some interesting responses:

“Always wait for playback to start before you put your cans on. Just to be sure the level isn’t deafening. Encourage musicians to turn down the feeds they don’t need so they can hear what they want without having to crank the HP system (if you have a system that lets musicians mix their own HP mix)” Steve DeMott

“Always ask the musicians to take off their cans before you make any patching or routing changes. Always!” Mike Thorne

“Don't ever switch anything on a DI box without taking headphones off or muting speakers, even if it's just the pad switch. It can kill systems and eardrums” Mark M Thompson

“Wearing acoustically flat moulded hearing protection under cans means that cans can be run louder and remain safe to wear. Wearing dead cans over live IEMs is the other side of same coin.” Luke Goddard

“Not directly related to studio work, but general hearing health: I've noticed that the noise cancelling functions in all the fancy consumer devices let me listen to music and podcasts at a lower overall level than I would otherwise. Worth the extra money for the feature.” Nathaniel Reichman

I hadn’t mentioned headphones when I asked for the team’s thoughts but you’ve probably noticed a pattern here. Headphones are the number one hazard to hearing health in the studio.

That being said they are not the only hazard. I recall very foolishly getting my ear buzzed when moving a mic on a guitar amp. The amp was in an iso booth and the player was in the control room. He knew I was in there and I’d told him not to play until I was back but when my nose was almost touching the grille cloth he absent-mindedly chugged out a chord. I made it (ahem) “very clear” that I was unhappy about this. He was mortified, but I take responsibility for that one. Guitarists are, after all, guitarists and idle fingers will noodle.

And it’s not just guitarists. Audrey Martinovich nailed it with her contribution:

“Every time a drummer hits a drum while I’m placing mics, that’s an hour of billable studio time”

Something tells me that’s not a joke.

Your Ears Are At Risk

The issue all of these scenarios have in common is that an engineer placing mics and a performer putting headphones on their head are all putting their ears in front of something someone else has control over. If I turn my headphones up I stop before they get too loud. If I’m turning your headphones up that feedback loop is broken - though feedback loops aren’t a great thing to be talking about when discussion headphone mixes… Of course the rise of monitoring systems which place control of monitor mixes in the hands of the user are fairly ubiquitous but responsibility ultimately rests with the engineer. I’m not saying that performers shouldn’t have control of their own level, just that this doesn’t make the problem go away.

Instrument Manufacturers Are Addressing Ear Safety

Hearing damage is something the world is much more mindful of that it was years ago. Audiences at gigs often wear hearing protection and levels are more carefully monitored in the first place. When I started going to gigs in the mid 80s, ringing ears were expected and accepted as part of the experience. If you look at guitarists’ gear, 40 years ago 100 watt valve heads and full stacks were still commonplace. The focus these days is more on small amps and it’s mostly because old school amps are just too damn loud, ask an AC30 owner…

An interesting, more recent development, is a change in how drums are marketed. I remember not that long ago that drums seemed to be exclusively marketed on their volume. “power, projection, cuts through etc”. This seemed particularly out of place to me when this messaging was attached to cymbals, which, unless you’re lucky enough to have a drummer with great internal balance are pretty much always too loud, even compared to a rim-shotted snare drum! This has changed in recent years with a proliferation of perforated “quiet” cymbals which promise the same feel and tone but with much reduced output. This is probably related to the fact that every drummer I’ve ever met despises rubber cymbal triggers of the kind found on electronic kits.

Should Interfaces Have Features To Address Ear Safety?

If even drummers, the perennial butt of muso jokes, are coming round to the idea of quiet is best, why is it that audio interface manufacturers seem to be marketing their headphone amplifiers purely in terms of their power? Headroom is of course important and the amount of power needed is extremely variable in professional applications. You might be listening for noise in very quiet passages one minute and previewing samples which are normalised to 0dBFS the next. And high impedance headphones will put less level into your ears at a given setting than low impedance IEMs but considering the evidence that the biggest hazard facing ear health in the studio is headphones, isn’t this something which deserves more attention?

One of the advantages of using an HDX or Carbon based Pro Tools system is that you can run a limiter on your headphone outputs without incurring latency. Limiters aren’t a magic solution to this issue and are definitely no substitute for the good advice given at the start of this article but if interfaces can provide DSP for effects, would it be a good idea to also provide some kind of safety features for headphones?

If audio interface manufacturers were to look at this area more closely, precisely what such a system might look like is up for debate. Whatever it was I would want it to be easy to switch off but a non-invasive system which could be disabled by the user would, I feel, be a good thing. Some digital consoles automatically mute feedback, would it be possible to create something which responded automatically to sudden jumps in level. A simple limiter is one thing but with the potential of machine learning would something a little more sophisticated be that hard?

Specialised Solutions For Ear Safety

Are there any solutions which are designed specifically for this issue? I spoke recently with Stephen Wheatley from LimitEar, a company which targets these issues specifically. He made the excellent point that hearing damage is linked to cumulative exposure. It’s not just about the moments we are at risk of injury as a result of dramatic exposure to dangerously loud noise, its also about your total exposure throughout the day.

Ear damage isn’t something which happens just in the studio, if you use noise cancelling headphones on public transport on your way to the studio that reduces your exposure in exactly the same way as running your headphones more gently during an editing session. The are after all the same ears!

LimitEar supply solutions to employers such as the BBC but are very aware that freelancers are particularly at risk because of the nature of their employment. If you are a freelancer and this is something you feel you should be more proactive in then check them out. A limiter isn’t really the right tool for managing these risks.

What do you do to minimise risk to yourself and your clients in your studio? Do you use anything as a safety net to protect ears in your studio? Would you use an automatic solution if one existed? Share your thoughts.