@ghdprentice Experience tells you what is acceptable and what is not. Ears ringing is never acceptable. That is natures way of warning you, you have gone to far. Most of us music lover, concert goer types have made the mistake of going to a concert without hearing protection that turned out to be too loud and our ears rang for a day or two. Peter Gabriel did that to me back in 1982. I have carried hearing protection with me ever since. That concert had to be in the 110 dB range. I am very use to 95 dB and will not tolerate much louder before the hearing protection goes in. You do not want to get close to ear ringing levels. Etymotic makes musician hearing protection plugs that are excellent once you get your ears use to them. They attenuate sound without changing the frequency balance.
IMHO at 70 - 80 dB you can't even do string quartets justice and you are missing a lot of the joy in music. Get an SPL meter so you have a reference, they are not very expensive at all and $50 gets you a very serviceable one. If your system is balanced at 80 dB it will not be comfortable at 90 dB and this is the main reason people shy away from volume. The analog folks have no good way to deal with it, but with digital signal processing you can make a system balanced at any volume by adjusting bass and treble levels to mirror Fletcher Munson curves. 95 dB becomes perfectly comfortable for anyone not trying to hold a conversation.