Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005 Status: offline
|
" was talking to a professional bass player last week, who was telling me how too much bass/too loud can actually cause health problems--he told me me firsthand of a cardiac arrhythmia that resulted from him being too close & having it set too high. Apparently, certain frequencies can also wreck havoc on the GI system... " Much as I don't like to respond having already been the last poster, there is alot to that. I have about 2X200 WPC RMS going into a pair of eights which are surprisingly efficient, and a ten and a twelve. It sounds like it would be all fucked up but it isn't. Here is the difference : Any asshole can shake your body with enough power, but the ones who know what they're doing can actually make you HEAR the music, not just feel it. There is a BIG difference. I am pretty decent at acoustics. I am well read on the subject and have had experiences. I am the type of person some of whose friends ask where to put their speakers when they move. When I pick out the speaker placement THEN they figure out where the rest of the furniture goes, of course based on my assumed listening positions. And in the cases when I find it necessary to use a graphic equalizer, they MARK THE SETTINGS. I set it to a variety of materials with which I am familiar, and they stick to using the normal bass and treble, but I have the sound balanced to where those controls usually stay about flat. It may need adjusting based on the song, but they leave the EQ the fuck alone. So I am not bullshitting about the difference between feeling the bass versus hearing it. It's NOT purely a matter of power. Now as for feeling it, I have felt alot higher frequencies that most. Some of my people have had such loud stereos, AND DIDN'T EVEN LIKE ALOT OF BASS, that you could feel the vocals and lerad guitars and shit in your chest. If the bass is harmful because it is like experiencing a bunch of small explosions, well these are a bit smaller explosions but there are many more of them per second. So which is worse ? Twenty a second at 40 PSI or 400 per second at 10 PSI ? (figures off the top of my head, just to illustrate the point) I know I am starting, and surprisingly JUST starting to experience significant hearing loss. I have been at concerts whre a speaker would have a warning "STAY TWENTY FEET AWAY OR HEARING DAMAGE WILL OCCUR". Of course you know what I did, walked right up to it, it was not all bass, I could feel the singer's voice. That's fucking loud. Now really there is louder, but it differs from sound reinforcement in some ways. I have had among the loudest headphones around. I had the specs and can get them again, but I actually calculated that my Sony MDR-CD5 achieved 126 Db. Of course you have to drive them right. The other nice thing about them was that they were ruler flat down to two hertz - about three octaves lower than you can hear. But I bought those (over a hundred bucks) AFTER my buddy Bret blew out my REALLY loud headphones. Those ones you didn't even have to put on. Modified Sansui SS-10s running DIRECTLY off the speaker wires. Luckily both of those sets ran off a reciever that had a very advanced low filter, something like 18 Db/octave or more. That was because we still had turntables back then. So if you set an M-80 on a table in front of your chest, blow it off but wear ear protection, what can it do to you ? It is say two feet away so it won't break the skin, or any bones I would think. But what about effects to the organs ? That is a good fucking question - really. T^T
|