LOUDEST Concert and Tinnitus

High on Fire

Death Is This Communion tour

The only concert I've ever been to where they handed out earplugs at the door.  I already had my own.  It was a small venue and my whole body vibrated.  I had a nice, snug fit so I didn't dare take my earplugs out in between acts!

At some point, maybe in my late 20s or early 30s, I went to a concert and my ears rang for days.  It was painful.  Ever since then, I've worn earplugs.  I have tinnitus, probably a minor case.  I used to use crappy earbuds cranked to the max so that didn't help.  Most of the time I don't notice it.  Usually only in very quiet places do I hear it.  I find using noise canceling headphones soothing.  It seems to tamp down that ring for me.

Grand Funk Railroad. Circa late 70s. It was so loud and unpleasant that my buddy and I cut out early. I remember listening to the sound flooding out as we exited the arena while my ears were still ringing. Any hearing impairment I have, I blame on that concert.

Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium- by far the loudest

The Who at Los Angeles Coliseum

The Who at Merriweather Post Pavilion

For me, it’s a tie:

- Bruce Springsteen at Max’s Kansas City. It was a very small club on Park Avenue South near the NE corner of Union Square that became famous as Andy Warhol’s hangout (his studio was on the NW corner of Union Square). I think Bruce thought he was playing before a stadium crowd of 50,000 instead of a room that could barely squeeze in 170. My head was ringing for days. 
The album can be found here: 

- Fela at Studio 54 - it was so loud that the distortion became part of the instrumentation. 

I attended way too many loud concerts in the 60’s and 70’s. Many of them were in large (for those days) venues - the Spectrum and original Electric Factory at 22^nd and Arch in Philadelphia (saw Jefferson Airplane at both - most memorably the Electric Factory, in 1968), Baltimore Civic Center (as it was then known) - that somewhat mitigated the sound intensity via cubic footage and crowd size.

It was the smaller venues that exacted their toll, mostly due to Hot Tuna. I saw them at Ryder College in NJ in a small auditorium (loud!) They played almost all night at The Academy of Music (now the Palladium) in New York in the early 70’s; it was so painfully loud that my ears didn’t stop ringing for days. (I saw them at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in NJ in 2014 and 2015. They weren’t as loud as they had been “back in the day”, but my wife and I came equipped with ear protection just in case.)

I also had an Olds W31 that I ran with open headers, mostly at Atco Dragway in South Jersey. The ends of the header collectors were right under the front seats, and even with a helmet it was like being in a closed oil drum that was being whacked with baseball bats thousands of times a minute.

My tinnitus has been present for so long that I can’t actually remember when it started; maybe 10 - 15 years ago. It’s in both ears and loud, but not something I tend to dwell on. I have noted that some things make it worse, for example NSAID medications. When listening to music at home, a moderate Scotch, etc. helps mitigate the tinnitus (although it seems to make it a little worse the next day - a relatively small price to pay, I guess).

I have also found that my hearing anomalies make me extremely sensitive to distortion in recorded music. In response, I have put together a system that is very clean sounding and prefer AAD CDs, Qobuz 24bit/192K recordings and really cleanly mastered vinyl.