I stopped down at the USITT show last month in St. Louis. I enjoy going to this show for a day every year to watch all the enthusiasm that thousands of kids have for the Arts. Plus, it’s great to see the various vendors giving back their knowledge to the next generation. Since the government seems to care little about the arts during the current administration it’s so much more important to see the other companies that did show up to pass knowledge.
Something in Common
I stepped out to dinner with some old friends, two of which have had employment ties at Morpheus Lights, just like myself. Keith Bennett is still a salesman working there. Dusty Hudgins is an old touring lighting guy that I used to gig with. Now he’s hawking gear over at GLP. As we sit close together in one corner of a table, we realize we have something even more in common. We don’t hear as well as we should. Of course, we all played guitar at some point and we were all told by our parents to “Turn that music down before you go deaf!” On numerous occasions.
Keith traveled around playing in bands and keeping his amp turned high. Dusty sat out at a lighting console. I probably hurt myself doing monitors for heavy metal bands before spending another 20 years at FOH at the mercy of the audio engineer. The Beyer headsets I wore to speak with spot ops offered little protection themselves, and if I wore ear plugs I couldn’t hear the music properly or the spot ops when they posed a question. Later on in my career, I finally found in ear monitors and they made a difference, blocking out the noise and allowing me to set a level that was safe. Too little, too late.
70 and 85 Percent
I get my ears tested with my yearly physical. One is running at 70 percent and the other is at 85 percent. Sometimes I have to turn my head so my good ear can hear the person on my left. I consciously try to walk on the left side of people so I remain in earshot, should they speak. My son has a tendency to almost whisper when he’s asking me a question. Or at least I think it’s a whisper, he always has to ask me things twice. I can stand next to my two buddies and have a conversation because the din in the bar is not loud. But when we get to the table I find my two friends are huddled leaning in towards me so we can all talk over the ambient noise.
“Hidden Hearing Loss”
Apparently, we suffer from something called “Hidden Hearing Loss.” Standard tests do not show any loss in our hearing, but the problem is real. We can’t hear people across crowded dinner tables, let alone a conference table, without speaking up. The difference with hidden hearing loss is that our ears don’t necessarily have trouble hearing quiet sounds when there is no noise in the background, so the results of an audiometry test look fine. They have a very different type of hearing test for this: a series of electrodes attached to one’s head so scientists can examine the electrical activity in the brain in response to various sounds. I don’t need any scientific evidence to tell me I have this.
Advances in audio are amazing. In my new car (yes, the Chrome Burnt Orange model I wrote about in February finally arrived), my stereo has a new cool mode I like. If the RPMs go up and I’m going faster, my stereo will turn itself up to compensate for extra wind and motor noise. And vice versa. It’s very clever. But how come they can’t figure out a way to turn the volume way down when I turn it off, so I don’t get blasted the next morning?
For Nook’s video intro to the April 2017 issue of PLSN, go to http://plsn.me/201704ednote.
