@cheeseweasel 459105 wrote:

Find some headphones that are good at dealing with high SPLs. Sony actually make some decent closed-back headphones for DJs that can go pretty loud. Just remember though that loud headphones are about the best way there is to damage your ears – if you’ve managed to drive a pair of cans to the point that they’ve started to rattle you might want to think about how it’s affecting your hearing.

Drugs like MXE and Ketamine dull the hearing as well, making it easy to do this, also if you are not careful its easy to send noisy/distort signals into your amp.

A few years ago I did a sweep test with 3 of my friends. wasn’t very “scientific”, basically, run the sweep, press the space bar when the sound stops and look at the frequency. I was then in my mid 30s, the other dude 27 and the youngest 23. We were all equally moosed (this was after a party) but whilst me and the 27 year old got up to 19.5 kHZ, the younger lad’s HF range had stopped at 14 kHZ. This is the sort of heaing range of a 50-60 year old (and also why tney tend to hoard and praise 1960s/1970s audio qequipment which lacks HF response).

Personally I have 3 pairs of headphones, some open-back Sennheiser HD600s which sound amazing and rarely leave the house – they’re way too expensive and delicate to take to a gig (and pretty useless in a noisy environment anyway as they’re open-backed) so I just use them for listening to music and mixing recordings, a pair of Sennheiser HD25s for general use and live work, and a cheap £15 pair of Sonys that are pretty much disposable.