@ghdprentice The CDC is a totally lost cause. All of these silly studies are assumptions taken by people who hate loud music. Think about it. How do you do a study like that. Are you going to subject people to 95 dB for years to see what happens? How do you know what a person was exposed to, take a history? Do you carry a sound pressure level meter around with you all the time? These are the same people that told us pot makes you sterile and shoved a dangerous and ineffective vaccine down our throats. For 40 years I did comprehensive hearing tests on individuals from every walk of life as a family physician (Not a modern primary car provider) I followed them through decades. Not one of my musicians, who played electric music on stage had hearing loss beyond normal presbycusis. The ones that wound up with hearing aids either had a family history of hearing loss or were subject to a lot of impulse noise from machines and guns. My 72 year old dead head friend still hears fine and I still hear to 16 kHz at last check. I have been listening at 95 dB (when the music calls for it) as long as I can remember. My 95 dB is as measured, dBSPL , not dBFS. Remember dB is a relative scale.
@carlsbad2 I can understand your position. Most systems at 95 dB sound like sh-t. They hurt my ears. But, not because they are inherently bad systems. They are not tuned for louder levels. Mine is tuned for louder levels with the high end being rolled off. Our ears are much more sensitive to high frequencies as volume increases. If your system is balanced at 85 dB it will hurt at 95 dB Even my wife was vacuuming along to Poco at 95 dB yesterday. 95 dB is not that loud. Many concerts hit 105 dB, twice as loud. Now that makes my ears ring, in go the plugs. At the range I wear 30 dB attenuators made by Etymotic. We saw Mark Lettieri two weeks ago in a theater setting. I would estimate it was around 95 dB most of the time and the sound was wonderful. I did not see anyone wearing hearing protection. What 95 dB does is it gets people up and dancing. 85 dB does not.