Man, am i losing my hearing?

Glad to have you back here Slappy. You said you were in the military. Did you have anything to do with morter shells or rocket launchers? These can have a drastic effect on hearing. I knew someone that was in the military and fired morter shells--lots of them. Whenever he talked to people he used a very loud voice. If you didn't speak loudly back to him he would ask you to repeat it. My guess is his hearing was about 30% as sensitive as most other people in their mid 30s.

Another interesting thing I've found out about myself has to do with excercise. If I don't excercise my hearing, particularly high frequency falls off. If I get into a very strong and disciplined regimin for a few weeks--my system actually sounds a bit shrill to me. Has anyone else every experienced this? When I first discovered it I thought I was losing my hearing, and found out it was because I had not kept up with a good workout routine. As soon as I got back to a good routine my hearing went back to what it was. Since then, I've actually tried to see if I can reproduce the effect, and oddly enough I can, but also realize a certain portion of that is psychoacoustics (or me just being plain nuts--but aren't we all a little bit in this hobby).

To go along with what Rives said, even M16's can mess you up because they are so close to the ears. At least that seemed to be my experience..many many years ago. And as others have said,, wait till you hit or pass 50! Say what?

ROFL you guys are great, its good to hear from you all again, i gotta get back on the audio wagon.

Slappy,
May I suggest you get your hearing tested, take the blower and put it on after the warranty on the Mustang ends.

Yeah, I have that problem too, as everybody in my family mumbles then says I'm going deaf. They say that just because I do some pro sound stuff but I can tell the difference if the singer sounds muddy & I need to boost 2.5k or 4k. Actually only one of them mumbles; the others just talk w/o looking at me. The analogy would be listening to your spkrs. when they're facing the wall instead of you.

Another example is the weather dudes talking about the upcoming TD heading this way. The first day they all said "Sydney" & it wasn't until they flashed the name on the screen I knew it was "Cindy". Doesn't matter, as I have cousins with each name. (So what does that mean?)

Anyway, it's a conspiracy, I tell ya, 'cause when I went to another channel, the weather dude made a point of enunciating "Cindy" and I had no trouble at all making it out. People mumble, talk too fast, don't use proper grammatical structure...doesn't have anything to do with listening to loud music, shooting off rounds or running cars w/open headers. (You are going to run open headers, no?)