[Joe Bloggs]

So at the time you didn't hear anything or feel any pain?

Late to this thread--best wishes to Argyris that his hearing clears up. I'm wondering the same thing--did the ear damaging treble sound loud or could you hardly hear it (and that's why you turned it up so loud?)

 

[Swoosh]

If I listen to music at 1/3 of the ipod's capacity without an amp, will my ears get damaged? I don't listen at high volumes, just often.

 

[vid]

I'd be seriously careful with those high-frequency sweeps. You're perceiving only a fraction of the energy that's being transmitted into your ears.
 
Anyways, it's a good thing your ears apparently recovered. (You can also lose your hearing by sneezing, by the way; ears weren't made too durable.)

 

[Argyris]

So at the time you didn't hear anything or feel any pain?

Nope. From what I understand hearing loss is painless unless the sound is REALLY loud, and probably it depends on the frequency makeup of the sound. As loud as I had the stuff playing, it was right at the top of the human hearing range so I still perceived it as relatively quiet.

Late to this thread--best wishes to Argyris that his hearing clears up. I'm wondering the same thing--did the ear damaging treble sound loud or could you hardly hear it (and that's why you turned it up so loud?)

Like I said above, I could hear it but it was still fairly faint. In fact, I could tell my laptop's crappy sound hardware wasn't producing a clean or very useable output--I heard weird aliasing effects and random dropouts. Also, HeadRoom's measurements would indicate the SRH440 doesn't really have a lot of extreme treble extension. I wonder how much signal was actually not being produced at all--this, along with the fact I had SineGen set to -12 dB output, probably saved it from having been much worse for me.

I'd be seriously careful with those high-frequency sweeps. You're perceiving only a fraction of the energy that's being transmitted into your ears.

Anyways, it's a good thing your ears apparently recovered. (You can also lose your hearing by sneezing, by the way; ears weren't made too durable.)

Sneezing? I'd love to hear or read about that! You're quite right about the durability thing, BTW. The last thing nature intended humans to do was find ways of amplifying sound or otherwise inventing machines that produce earsplitting amplitudes. Otherwise we would never have evolved a system that fails to regenerate its key components when they're damaged beyond repair.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

 
Quote:

Like I said above, I could hear it but it was still fairly faint. In fact, I could tell my laptop's crappy sound hardware wasn't producing a clean or very useable output--I heard weird aliasing effects and random dropouts. Also, HeadRoom's measurements would indicate the SRH440 doesn't really have a lot of extreme treble extension. I wonder how much signal was actually not being produced at all--this, along with the fact I had SineGen set to -12 dB output, probably saved it from having been much worse for me.

FWIW, if you're ever in the mood for testing this stuff again

, that's a telltale sign that there's crappy sample rate conversion going on.  If you're outputting directly from Sinegen to headphones (and not, say, to Virtual Audio Cable), try changing the sample rate that Sinegen outputs in.  The two major ones to try are 44.1 and 48kHz.  You DON'T need to turn the volume up to hear those aliasing artifacts from 10-20kHz

The other telltale sign of crappy SRC (sample rate conversion) is a roughness in the tones (they don't sound pure) below 1kHz.
 
If you are going through virtual audio cable, I found that for my win7 x64 machine I had to set VAC to only accept 44.1kHz input and make the rest of the system work with that somehow (one possibility is to have everything else work at 44.1kHz)
 
Finally, if those are frequencies you can hardly hear unless you have the amp turned up 3 quarters, those are definitely not the frequencies causing your tizziness

I'd look at lower treble frequencies that you're actually sensitive to instead.  Though one possibility is crappy SRC is introducing this treble noise that's causing this tizziness and can only be fixed by fixing the SRC and not by any EQing.