LOUDEST Concert and Tinnitus

With all those entries, it's a shame there's no measurement of distortion, too, or the measurements can be misleading as far as the subjective experience. 

In my younger days, I came home from many a concert with my ears ringing, sometimes for a couple of days.  But the concert that hurt the most was a local three piece band. Guitar, keyboards and drums. The venue was the upstairs of a bar. They weren’t particularly loud, but something in their PA setup had me out the door in less than a half hour, but the damage was done! I’ve had issues with my right ear ever since.

Mine was Neil Young, at the United Palace in NYC, with my son.  We both had ringing ears for three or more days.  

the Stones, Grateful Dead had very good sound systems. top notch. the best naturally. it was so clean it did not hurt while it was damaging your hearing. the security staff would always provide me with plugs. hearing today has suffered tremendously. but i attended over 1000 shows. was in and around the biz so on a lot of guest list

I don’t what was the loudest concert (maybe The WHO, Vancouver, 80’s) but we saw Eric Church and Dave Matthews in Tahoe last summer, same venue. SPL meter on my phone. Eric Church - excellent sound, did not need the ear plugs. Dave’s sound sucked and it was too loud - didn’t stay for the whole show.

I do know the exact moment my tinnitus started - outdoor rave in London - late 90’s. Got too close to a wall of JBLs. So call it 25 years.

It is very prominent but stable. Roughly 50dB loss 750-4kHz both ears. I use an app called rain rain at night - it needs to be loud to drown it out.

Tinnitus can be really serious though - I have a close friend that got it recently from anti-depressant meds - a known risk - he was considering suicide - he has a wife and 2 little kids. Fortunately his mother knew I have tinnitus and she told him to call me. I talked to him for a long time - talked him of the ledge. He’s coping. Sound generator app and hearing aids.

I’m not ready for hearing aids yet but the theory is they can be programmed to amplify the attenuated frequencies which makes the ringing less prominent - some also have white noise - but there is no cure and none of the OTC stuff that claims to help works for me.

1994 Aerosmith concert in Budapest. Until next morning I could not hear people talk only when they shouted at top of their lungs. Ears ringing for three days afterwards.

Loudest noise ever: Airplane taxiing at Petrolina airport in Brasil (1989), I was on the balcony watching it, and as it turned it faced me and I was exposed to the jet engines noise for a split second. It felt like the world exploded, I could not hear anything for a while afterwards. Took about a month until hearing returned to normal. That was about 160dB....

Using ear protection regularly: when going to concerts, movies, while driving at also at work! Even though I work in a lab / office, the AC in big buildings is loud enough to warrant noise protection.

Also, I have avoided gear that cause fatigue like Justinian's plague...  (not just any plague, but the granddady of all plagues.)

My hearing is fine out to 20kHz, and I'm 45. Also, it's quite a bit more trained when I was 20 - I hear much more than I did when I was younger. (When younger, I was not aware that I can hear any higher than 17kHz! It took training to identify what the super highs sound like.)

Four critical factors were there to prevent harin decline, and instead have improvement:

1. Protect from loud occasional music, and when exposed, TAKE VITAMIN C afterwards. Your ears will recover from most damage, but they need the fuel to do that. No fuel, damage is permanent. Vitamin C available - no oxidative damage to neurons.

2. Even more important: protect from repetitive constant noise. Hours and hours of 70-80dB noise exposure is just as bad, or even worse than occasional 110+dB.

3. Crucial: if you notice fatigue from stereo, it is your brain telling you to immediately stop, Also, you need to change your system to non-fatiguing. Me and my friends have experienced hat fatiguing stereo is the winner among all kinds of noise exposures to spectacularly your hearing prematurely.

Good luck, and happy concerts! ;

PS: The Die Antwort concert in Honolulu (about 2018?) was freakin loud as well... my most recent exposure to crazy levels of sound. Was totally worth it though.... lovely band!

I want to say The Meat Puppets at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill 25 years ago but I am sure that there many others too.

Loudest ever was Van Halen in Boulder in the seventies. However, no tinnitus until 2 years ago when I stood in Redrocks amphitheater for a 4 hour show from Umphrey's McGee. One of the best concert ever but the length of the loudness did me in :( 

Loudest I have been to was a Rush concert... I plugged my ears with tissue paper.  The show was OK but not even that great, and the volume and the whole thing made me wished I had stayed home... it wasn't enjoyable.

As for tinnitus: excellent hearing aids can actually help diminish, and possibly even diminish, tinnitus because they re-train your brain to attend to all the other sounds you can now hear besides the tinnitus.  ...   you should look into that research.... 

The Plasmatics at the Whiskey A Go Go back in the early 80's. My ears rang for a week. Luckily the ringing went away.

@macg19 

I know what you mean about that Who show in Vancouver. I was there.

Was that their 1st, 2nd or 5th farewell tour?

Sorry to hear about your friend. I can certainly understand how it would escalate to that point.

I had a lot of ear aches when I was young and it is the same scenario.

Both are unrelenting and unescapable.

@tony1954 That's awesome! I'm not sure what number though.

Thanks for the kind words.

unrelenting and unescapable

100%

I wonder why the health and safety lobby didn't outlaw rock concerts that were too loud.  Many who did not know suffered hearing damage.

Disaster Area at Milliway's, end of the universe. Great show

@hifiguy42 

Yes, there can be no band louder.

Apparently Douglas Adams was a huge Pink Floyd fan.

"He named their 1994 album ‘The Division Bell’, and played guitar with David Gilmour at his 42nd birthday party. (The number 42 having particular significance for Hitchhiker’s fans).  Pink Floyd also helped inspire Adams to create Disaster Area."

Kiss, 1976.  Not really my type of music, but I went out of curiosity and girls. It was during a time when louder, was deemed better. Fortunately, I was young and recovered quickly. 

Wisconsin football stadium: not sure if it is folklore but students measured on the Richter scale stomping to a song

Jack White.  

1975 Disco.  Huge black speakers stuck my head in them. Wow!Big JBls or something.

Setting off dynamite.  With earplugs, still loud

I was always amazed how loud a Feder guitar amp will go as well.

Randy Hansen Machine Gun: Tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

Whiskey A GoGo early 80's. My ears rang for 3 days

@daledeee1 

I had a run in with Jack White in Seattle a few years ago.

It was way too loud, but the worst part was his fixation with playing the screechiest guitar notes possible. Fingernails on a blackboard would have seemed melodic by comparison.

Yes it was about 5000 people standing.  Some of his songs are pretty good "Ball and Biscuit" is a good one to sample.  Good recording too.

I forgot one.  Police 1984 or so.  Bass rippled my belly nearly nauseating but good sound.

I also want to repeat, to answer the OP's second question: tinnitus does not have to get progressively worse, though you do need to protect from further loud shocks going forward... 

High quality hearing aids these days can and do diminish, and in some cases eliminate, tinnitus.  Some even have tinnitus reduction programs built in to retrain the brain; however, even just the recovery of at least some high frequency hearing gives your brain something to focus on besides the tinnitus which thereby reduces (or eliminates) your perception of the tinnitus.  

Interesting thread. 
 

Probably the loudest concert and the closest to a truly religious experience to me was The Who in ~1969… Chicago. The last time they played Tommy for a long time (they said that was the last time ever… but it was not). 
 

Fortunately, I went to concerts ignorant of the possibility of hearing damage and do not have tinnitus. I started to realize coverts were too much in the 80’s and started stuffing paper in my ears, then just stopped going to concerts. 
 

I have been going to acoustic jazz and symphony concerts over the last 30 years. I have poked my head into many rock concerts… usually with napkin in my ears and just don’t go any more.

Fortunately at 70 I still have my hearing and can appreciate my audio system. Mostly luck more than great sense. 

I’ve been to many great & loud concerts since 1972 but I saw & sort of heard the New Riders of the Purple Sage w/ Jerry Garcia joining in at the Academy of Music in NYC in 1975. We weren’t even sitting close & in the mezzanine pretty far back but it was crazy loud to the point where I could barely tell who I was listening to!

strange thing is back then there was no “array”  systems w/ DSP & class D amps so popular today, just big stacks of Marshall’s & Fenders but dam was it loud!  

I pity those who were close to the stage. Strangely, I saw Jerry & the Dead back then several times & it was loud but very clear & enjoyable. 

The loudest concert for me was Cheap Trick in the early 80's while I was in college.  I was sitting at the seventh row from stage in a relatively small theater.  My ears were ringing for almost a week afterward.

My tinnitus started almost 20 years ago after a company Christmas party.   There was a hired band and a dance floor.   They were playing so loud that I thought my ears were going to bleed.  I got quite depressed for a while after the onset of tinnitus.

And then a few years later,  I went to a HiFi store called Harvey Electronics in NYC looking for some new speakers.  If you live in NYC area, you've probably heard of them.  They're no longer in business.  Anyway, the sales person was showing me a pair of Sonus Faber.  He put on some Dire Straits and cranked up the amp to an insanely loud level.   Stupid me for not reacting to it and just sat there listening.   My tinnitus got way worse afterward.   Ever since that incident,  I always carry earplugs with me, and be very conscious about protecting my hearing.

These days, my tinnitus flares up once in a while, but I've learned to live with it and no longer let it bother me.

@jonwolfpell 

"Strangely, I saw Jerry & the Dead back then several times & it was loud but very clear & enjoyable. "

McIntosh powered instead of Marshall powered.

@daledeee1 

I was always amazed how loud a Feder guitar amp will go as well.

In jr high school, 79’, one of our friends would show up at parties with a Fender Twin (I think 65w) and play Eruption perfect (there were a few ‘bands’ in the school) - that amp could rip your face off if you got too close!

@cd318

Cool story - I had the pleasure of meeting Douglas Adams - related to an immersive “game” called Starship Titanic about 2 parallel universes on board a ship

We provided authoring software

he died too early

Jacksonville Coliseum 1974(?) Black Sabbath. First two songs sounded amazing then drenching sound level panicked me…..ear canals felt “slick”….stuffed napkins didn’t stop 4-5 days of ringing numbness.

Johnny Winter, smaller club New Orleans 1980; injured his fretting hand, had to play slide only….brutal volume, I left.

Funkadelic, 1970 (?), Miss State cow barn; first introduction to “wall of sound”.

Fell asleep to Yes’ Close to the Edge at home late-late a few years ago, too loud…ears ringing for a few days…never again.

Can still hear refrigerator turn on at night so all is not lost….but random mild ringing happens occasionally. Am lucky.

My loudest show as an audience member was The Ramones at The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium,  a cement bunker of a room. Second was Ray Davies Telecaster when The Kinks played The Fillmore Auditorium (or was it Winterland?) in 1971. SO piercing!

But the biggest scare I had was when I did a long audition (eight hours!) with a band that was forming that same year. I was positioned directly across the room from one of the two guitarists. His Guild Starfire was plugged into a Fender Twin Reverb amp, the latter pointed directly at me from about ten or twelve feet away. We jammed from ten at night until six the next morning, and as I packed up my drums the sound of the guys' voices were drastically muffled-sounding, like a blanket was over their heads. Scared me to death! My hearing eventually returned to normal, but I'm sure there was some permanent damage.

Ted Nugent a dozen times, stereos, Black Sabbath, BTO, years-no, decades, of engines and race tracks and dyno runs...a lifetime of poor judgment regarding my hearing. Now I have a permanent noise floor that sounds like 1000 metallic crickets. A cautionary tale for anyone not there yet. Mine didn't start until about 10 years ago, after I started taking precautions. 

The Ramones. University of Rochester (NY) campus in the early 80's. Ears rang for three days. I had tinnitus but it went away on it's own.

Hot Tuna at the Palladium in November 1977.  I can still hear that concert more than 45 years later!

@macg19 

I had the pleasure of meeting Douglas Adams - related to an immersive “game” called Starship Titanic about 2 parallel universes on board a ship

We provided authoring software

he died too early

Yes, his death at only 49 back in 2001 was a great loss in so many ways.

Amongst other things Douglas may well also have been the greatest writer of these past 75 years.

Reading some of these accounts here of people losing their hearing for a few hours (or even days in some cases) is slightly concerning, particularly on an audio forum.

The loss of certain frequencies will no doubt have an effect upon the enjoyment of a Hi-Fi system.

In rare cases, the effect could be a good one according to maverick ENT doctor, Alfred A Tomatis who believed that hearing damage in his right ear helped Caruso achieve his greatness.

Third vote for AC/DC - saw them late seventies in a small venue in Dublin - few hundred capacity. At the back of the hall the bass drum was like being hammered in the chest like punch bag. A week of threshold shift followed - not ringing but the loss of probably 15k hz of bandwidth. But it taught me a lesson about hearing protection.

Rory Gallagher in '78.  My hearing was crap for a week.  I worked in the music distribution business and would get comped show tickets all the time.  But I learned early on right after Rory to just stuff some tissue in my ears.  I ended up with a mild case of tinnitus after standing and watching a pile driving machine pound in a huge support.  I was about 50 feet away.  Stood there 10 minutes.  It comes and goes but the day after, I thought something was way wrong.  It's barely even noticeable most days.

Frank Zappa at an old skating rink in Honolulu was the loudest for me. Now I can’t tell the difference between 320kbps and wav!

Ringing for a week, and other subjectives have been replaced with an iPhone.
And the Etymotic ear plugs are like $15 (USD), so there are not a lot of excuses…

If they worked out a way to power the phone through the microphone I could have charged the battery.

This was at the Margaret Cort Arena in Melbourne on Feb 19th.

+1 for AC/DC (Joe Louis Arena, 1988 or '89)

+1 for The Who (Pontiac Silverdome, 1980ish).

Kiss, Cobo Arena (1977)

@sejodiren 

Was lucky to see Rory three times back in the '70's and each one was magic.

Don't remember him being that loud, but there's a long list of things I don't remember from those days.

Billy Squire, opening up for Bad Company and Styx in Toronto at the Budweiser Stage in the early 2000s, as I recall. I have had tinnitus for decades predominantly in my left ear that I find is worsening noticeably with age (now 67). I’ve done my own research and consulted with two Ear, Nose and Throat specialists to conclude that there is no cure. There is a theory that the brain ’fills-in’ auditory gaps caused by hearing loss in high frequency ranges that may be mitigated with a hearing aid. I will be trying this option soon.

The only concert I actually walked out on due to unbearable loudness was Joe Bonamassa at the Meridian Hall in Toronto.

@tony1954

It was in a small club here in Portland. Maybe 150 people. Low ceilings too. Saw U2 there on their first US tour. Rory was a fantastic show. Crystal clear sound and a fine job by the sound guy. But yea, I learned from that to take care of my ears and I think in the long run, it saved my ears from future damage doing the tissue trick! LoL Who’d a thunk my mild tinnitus would be caused by an industrial thing.

Fwiw- I’ve had tinnitus for decades as primarily a result of being around firearms. I’ve experimented with a variety of all in one tinnitus supplements which did nothing to alleviate it. However, I have had good success with using high quality, excipient free compounds taken in combination. Ginko / B12 / Magnesium significantly reduces the severity of my tinnitus to the point that it’s not a distraction during my listening sessions. Ymmv of course and it’s not an overnight solution. You have to keep track of your dosage and tweak it over time. I’m into the whole Bio-hacking thing so I enjoy doing this stuff.

Van Halen and Rush were the loudest I heard, both playing Madison Square Garden for the first time early 80s. The Who at Shea Stadium were loud but it's outside and they had other crowd problems far worse.

Had tickets in the first five rows to the stage for both Van Halen and Rush. A guy behind me at the Van Halen show were chatting randomly before the show. Into the second song, I turned to him and he was tapping his ears how loud it was. He was clearly overwhelmed by the volume.

My friends who were in high school played music and worked on 48th St. Music Row in NYC. They all brought Sonic II earplugs which cut high frequencies. I had a pair of course as I learned from these guys to be careful at the young age of 17.

Recall pulling the plugs out during the show to check how it was and being overwhelmed the loudness. It had to be well into triple digit decibels, over 110 db. 

After that July Van Hallen concert, everyone marveled what a great concert it was. Everyone was blown away from the opening number "Fire." But at least among our small group, no one suffered any negative hearing impact. Everyone kept those Sonic II earplugs in and today, even though on occasion I like to play music on the louder side, no hearing loss other than the typical high frequency reduction due to age. I can't even notice that either and think my hearing is good to go. 

Sorry to hear of the trouble so many have had. I hope there is some new treatment to aid tinnitus. 

@sejodiren 

There is a club in Vancouver called the Commodore Ballroom thats been around close to 100 years. Small capacity and a dance floor that is spring-loaded.

Saw Rory there, along with Tom Petty's first tour, Roy Buchanan, Buddy Rich, David Byrne, Moby and countless others.

@sejodiren - I saw U2 on that first tour as well, at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco; they played 2 shows in one night; I got to stick around for both. 

@larsman I was good friends with the WEA rep for Portland.  So 1980 when 'Boy' was released on Island.  Great show and got to meet and have a few beers with them.  Not near as loud as Rory though!  

Loudest concert I attended was The Who at the International Ampitheater in Chicago in 1980;  my rings rang to the next day.

Loudest event, Drag Racing nationals at Chicagoland Speedway...I wore molded earplugs for that event, but you could feel the sound through your body.

@sejodiren - and I worked in the local wholesale record business at the time, so one of our local WEA reps (Bam Bam!) also got me a Warner Brothers live U2 promo-only album; I think that's pretty rare these days. 

Loudest concert - Oingo Boingo - Early/Mid 1980's Uptown Theatre K.C. Mo. Ear bleeding loud.

Honorable Mention; 

Rolling Stones - Kemper Arena K.C. M. O. Dec 1981

The Tubes - Memorial Hall K.C.K.S. April 1985