more thoughts about headphones…
Perhaps it is not a good idea to stuff things into our ears that hermetically seal them and thereby increase the humidity and temperature in them. I imagine sealing our ears must be a big friendly invitation to bacteria and other organisms to multiply and potentially create infections.
This creates an obvious technological problem: if we can’t seal the ear off, how can we eliminate noise? This will remain an issue for IEMs as well as for over the ear headphones and will also impact the wearability of AR or VR goggles.
Another question to be researched is this: are there precedents from factory workers who labor in a very loud environment and have to wear ear protectors for long stretches of time. Do they get inflamed ears from the seal?
Perhaps this post is related after all? People might be listening without headphones because we can only wear them for so long…
Also see this post from 2019, especially the comments people left. This is not an isolated issue.
>Another question to be researched is this: are there precedents from factory workers who labor in a very loud environment and have to wear ear protectors for long stretches of time. Do they get inflamed ears from the seal?
In the United States, OSHA’s permissible exposure limit (PEL) is 90 dBA for all workers for an 8 hour day. When I worked in the semiconductor industry, the cleanroom had a noise environment at 93dBA from the laminar oxygen handlers. Consequently I had to wear ear protection, but not for 8h continuously: Because I was able to exit the cleanroom every 4h. I never had any problems. So … two things;
1) I didn’t have to have those protectors shoved into my ear canal for >=8h contiguous.
2) I was under 40 during my extended exposure times.
I never heard about any incidents from colleagues who had inflammation. Of course that doesn’t mean anything other than it was never talked about. What I am relating didn’t entail a formal study, and the company didn’t really care: OSHA requirements are what they are: wear eye protection, wear hearing protection, meet contamination standards (wear your bunny suit properly, including full facial covering) etc, etc, etc.
Could age play into this? I don’t know. None of the ear canal problems I am experiencing now took place prior to my turning 57-ish. It was really around that point that I began to notice all sorts of problems crop up which now persist … medical examinations, discussions, and results indicate that the issues I am experiencing since the onset of these symptoms are “idiopathic” …
hmm …on another level ..
clear hearing (and clear sight) is very hard to imagine
ego is always tangled in the narrative