What equilizer settings are you using to compensate for the ear damage from shooting?  

In my case, I have mild tenitus (msotly from .22's, unprotected as a dumb teen).  The tenitus is most prevelent in my left ear, which is typical for a right handed rifle shooter.  My case is actually quite mild and I image pretty typical of most members of this board. I hope that my mild hearing loss can be somewhat compensated for by adjusting the relevant frequency range when listening to music on headphones by some equilizer adjustments.  So how about, what settings should I use?



To ramble on - unfortunitially our sport is not completely trouble free.  I spoke with my companies ear specialist a while back, who's also a shooter, and he say's we're unfortinitially kind of screwed.  I don't remember the exact numbers, but ear damage begins at something like 85 decibles.  Gun fire is something like 150 decibles.  Ear protect, even the best, is only good for about 30 decibles.  doubling up ear protectiong is not additive, and adding muff's to the plugs only adds about 2-3 more decibles of effective protection.  So at best you get like 35 decibles of protection.  150-35 is still well above 85, so even with plugs, if you continue to shoot, you will damage your ears.  I suspect he's right because at night right after a good day of shooting (w/ ears) I still notice a mild ringing as I'm going to sleep.  I really feel sorry for the guys out there shooting w/ compensators.

Bummer that. :(

-Lazy

Hearing loss will first occur in the higher frequency ranges. If you think your ears are starting to go, I would boost everything from 5 khz on up to 16 khz. Not much, maybe 3-5 db to start. This should return the "presence" you may not be hearing. Mids & lows (lows particularly) are usually the last to go. When you start to have trouble hearing a 100 hz signal, it's time to start learning sign language. Hope it does'nt come to that.