I Invented a Sound That Knocked Out My Tinnitus

[Harley]

@R. David Case

I'm very intriqued by your idea and I think it is worthy of exploring.

Here is my problem.
Due to very loud tinnitus, my attention span is that of a fruit fly and I just don't have it in me to read through all of the 60+ pages, so I figured I would just ask you directly:

My tinnitus is the reactive kind (it sounds like a very high pitched industrial sand blaster with oscillating elements to it).
The more ambient noise, the sharper and higher pitch it gets, so it is virtually unmaskable.
Once the outside noise is removed, it goes back to the baseline, which by itself is pretty horrid to begin with.

I'm ready to order the Koss headphones from Amazon and give this a try, but I first wanted to ask you, if this would have a chance of working for someone with my type of reactive tinnitus?

Thank you kindly for any replies and thank you for sharing your idea here (regardless whether it will work for me or not).

 

[JohnAdams]

Against my better judgment, I just ordered a Koss KTX Pro from Amazon and I am about to try this and see how it goes, I have many other (much better and incidentally more expensive, in the thousands of euros) headphones, including electrostats, but I bought the €30 Koss so I can be as truthful to this experiment as possible guess is all we are seeing is placebo effect and I do hope I am wrong.

I tried to find the frequency response chart for the Koss KTX PRO1s and couldn't find it. Looks like this but wrong headphones.

It says the driver is titanium. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Titanium is non magnetic...

 

[MRItechssuck]

I have some hyperacusis from the MRI that I never had... will this help that?

For anyone still trying to download a .wav to an iOS device... I found this and it seemed to work... but I was probably the only old guy who was having trouble with this anyway ‍¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Leon909]

It says the driver is titanium. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Titanium is non magnetic...

By accident I bough the KTX PRO1T instead of PRO1. The T stands for titanium. It says that the membrane is coated with titanium.

Are those the wrong headphones then? Should I go with the KTX PRO1 without the titanium?

 

[MRItechssuck]

By accident I bough the KTX PRO1T instead of PRO1. The T stands for titanium. It says that the membrane is coated with titanium.

Are those the wrong headphones then? Should I go with the KTX PRO1 without the titanium?

Even the link on Tinnitus Mix website directs you to the same ones listed below....

On Amazon they only list the KTX PRO1...and the title is "Koss KTXPRO1 Titanium Portable Headphones with Volume Control"

• Titanium-coated drivers deliver accurate sound reproduction with little distortion
• Neodymium iron boron magnets offer deep bass

 

[R. David Case]

@R. David Case
I think adding curcumin or turmeric combined possibly with NAC to this would help. What do you think?

Well I am an herbalist at heart but nothing would make my tinnitus better except Tinnitus Mix.
Turmeric and cumin and curry are the best herbs in the world and clean the brain of plaque and many other benefits.

 

[R. David Case]

By accident I bough the KTX PRO1T instead of PRO1. The T stands for titanium. It says that the membrane is coated with titanium.

Are those the wrong headphones then? Should I go with the KTX PRO1 without the titanium?

No, those will work.

 

[R. David Case]

I have some hyperacusis from the MRI that I never had... will this help that?

For anyone still trying to download a .wav to an iOS device... I found this and it seemed to work... but I was probably the only old guy who was having trouble with this anyway ‍¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes it will help hyperacusis but you have to start ON VERY LOW VOLUME with headphones 2 inches behind ears and play for 20 minutes during the day and then play 40 minutes etc until you can get used to the sounds with the goal of playing for 6 hours a day / night.

 

[R. David Case]

I have only used the sound treatment for (1) night and so far no improvement. I hope that time will deliver the good results the other folks are getting.

It takes time and every person is different, I have had some take much longer than 3 weeks, but on average that is the recommendation.

 

[R. David Case]

Ah ok. So do the people reporting hearing improvements with this mean they can just hear better without the tinnitus masking it or are there other, separate improvements?

No we are seeing hearing improvements outside of the tinnitus being removed. Some people that are almost deaf in one ear but have tinnitus in their good ear are seeing improvements in their bad ear.

 

[R. David Case]

You weren't the one who essentially trapped me in a loud MRI, so I am happy with you volunteering to help everyone, whether I am personally helped or not.

I'm 4-5 days in, so I will do 30 days if not longer... what's there to lose?

I have had tinnitus... either around 18 years, or recently like one month... depending on how you define it. I didn't even notice it after a few years back then, and then for almost 2 decades I was good... until a new acoustic trauma a month ago (MRI).

I am playing the Tinnitus Mix on my iPad during the day, and a small MP3 player at night I can wear in my pocket. The only way I get the mix to play on an iOS device is connected to the internet and your website. I haven't figured out how to download it to iOS, hence the inexpensive MP3 player with 7-8 duplicate .wav files.

When I am on an airplane, how loud should the mix be... barely audible over the airplane noise, or louder and easily heard but not masking? This is where some passive noise reduction (ear muffs over the Koss) may be needed.

Thoughts?

You want to play it at a comfortable level. I personally play it about 40% volume, but when just starting I recommend around 20-30% volume.

The Bose noise canceling headphones work well for this therapy and would be great on a plane but they are $350 instead of $19 for the Koss.

 

[R. David Case]

~0/10


I am not sure if I am healing or just greatly suppressing my tinnitus. We shall see.

That makes my day John, some people get a rush when they make a lot of money but I get satisfaction every time Tinnitus Mix helps someone get their life back from tinnitus.

 

[R. David Case]

I wasn't expecting the hearing to improve like that... especially in less than a week! More people should be trying this. Now if I could get to where I'm able to sleep consistently with the headphones on I have a better shot at lowering or getting rid of the ringing. I'll try having the volume a little bit lower at night, as you suggested. I realize that getting rid of the tinnitus might take a while, but this is a surprisingly good start! Thanks again for offering this... and for free!

You are welcome!!!

 

[R. David Case]

First of all, thanks @R. David Case for making this sound!

4 nights in. Unfortunately my tinnitus hasn't changed - if anything it has gotten somewhat worse. My tinnitus is very high pitched - maybe that has to do with it. I can sometimes even hear my tinnitus on the higher frequency while listening to the Tinnitus Mix.

I'm wondering whether super high pitched tinnitus requires a sound that has more high frequencies in it.

That is possible, I believe the tinnitus is mainly above our hearing range and only the parts in the lower band is what we hear, or if it dips down in frequency then we perceive it has got louder.

 

[R. David Case]

@R. David Case

I'm very intriqued by your idea and I think it is worthy of exploring.

Here is my problem.
Due to very loud tinnitus, my attention span is that of a fruit fly and I just don't have it in me to read through all of the 60+ pages, so I figured I would just ask you directly:

My tinnitus is the reactive kind (it sounds like a very high pitched industrial sand blaster with oscillating elements to it).
The more ambient noise, the sharper and higher pitch it gets, so it is virtually unmaskable.
Once the outside noise is removed, it goes back to the baseline, which by itself is pretty horrid to begin with.

I'm ready to order the Koss headphones from Amazon and give this a try, but I first wanted to ask you, if this would have a chance of working for someone with my type of reactive tinnitus?

Thank you kindly for any replies and thank you for sharing your idea here (regardless whether it will work for me or not).

Well when I started the test group we had no idea Tinnitus Mix would stop hyperacusis, now we know it does but the instructions are different than just for tinnitus. I suspect that reactive tinnitus can also be stopped but you have to start on very low volume and don't put the Koss headphones over the ear, put them 2 inches behind the ear. Play Tinnitus Mix for 20 minutes day one, 40 minutes day two, etc with the goal of doing 6 hours a day/night.

 

[R. David Case]

I tried to find the frequency response chart for the Koss KTX PRO1s and couldn't find it. Looks like this but wrong headphones.

View attachment 33181

It says the driver is titanium. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Titanium is non magnetic...

I'm telling you there is something about the Koss headphones, they work WAY better than expensive ones, it must have to do with the titanium or coil size...

 

[Harley]

Well when I started the test group we had no idea Tinnitus Mix would stop hyperacusis, now we know it does but the instructions are different than just for tinnitus. I suspect that reactive tinnitus can also be stopped but you have to start on very low volume and don't put the Koss headphones over the ear, put them 2 inches behind the ear. Play Tinnitus Mix for 20 minutes day one, 40 minutes day two, etc with the goal of doing 6 hours a day/night.

Thank you sir.

 

[JohnAdams]

I'm telling you there is something about the Koss headphones, they work WAY better than expensive ones, it must have to do with the titanium or coil size...

The coil size doesnt make the magnetic field larger you should know that. It's the voltage and current.

 

[JohnAdams]

Yes it will help hyperacusis

What I was describing as noise sensitivity in my eight ear was surely HF hyperacusis and that's gone. It was gone after 3 nights. I cannot say for 100% because it could have been a coincidence, but Im betting it was because of this noise.

 

[JohnAdams]

By accident I bough the KTX PRO1T instead of PRO1. The T stands for titanium. It says that the membrane is coated with titanium.

Are those the wrong headphones then? Should I go with the KTX PRO1 without the titanium?

I don't know.

 

[JohnAdams]

Someone is going to see this and steal it and take credit for it, just watch.

 

[LostOutWest]

Update:

Day 2: Only could sleep about 4.5 hours on the second night because I had to wake up at 3:30a and fly to the midwest for a meeting, then turning right around and fly back. So I didn't listen to the Tinintus Mix much that night, and my day was a stressful mess. Woke up to a 3/10 tinnitus. Tinnitus was all over the boards, definitely a 6 or 7 /10 by end of day, but what can you expect with no sleep and a major hustle. It was also a fasting day, and I'm still jet lagged from my transcontinental odyssey two days prior. Sidenote: The Boeing 717 is criminally loud!

Day 3: Due to Day 2, I crashed hard for 12 hours and had Tinnitus Mix on whole time. Woke up to a much more buzzing / humming tinnitus than tonal. I've been seeing the tones wash away over the last week or so - my shaky little warbler in my right ear feels further and further away. Although the electrical-field-choral-hum is definitely present en mass, filling my entire head. The super high pitch annoyances seem to be fewer and farther between. Tinnitus is definitely changing a lot over the past few days.

I'll keep going with this Tinnitus Mix experiment. Let's see what happens.

I am using Bose headsets for this, but I too ordered the Koss headset, mainly because I think my big giant sleeping head is ruining these nice headphones.

One thing I can say for sure, is that my sound sensitivity / hyperacusis is completely gone. I believe Tinnitus Mix helped a lot for that. For this I am grateful.

 

[JohnAdams]

I just finished night 11. No real improvements over yesterday that I can tell, but I also didn't sleep that great.

 

[Rockrose]

My next step is to do this therapy as long as possible while continuing to take turmeric, glutathione, and NAC supplements. Then I am going to slowly experiment coming off them and the Tinnitus Mix one by one and see if I am healed or if I am just suppressing the tinnitus.

I want to go and hop on my beloved drum set but I need to play it safe and wait a while and play it all by ear.

I've read some of your posts on turmeric/curcumin so have been using it in cooking for at least one meal a day combining it with fats and pepper. I'm just afraid that a therapeutic dose would make my gray hair will turn yellow. I and others will be very interested to see how things go with your experiment. Tinnitus must be especially difficult for musicians. One of my nephews has been a full time drummer for more than a decade. I now worry about his hearing more than ever!

 

[pinklights98]

Someone is going to see this and steal it and take credit for it, just watch.

If more people use it and works for more people, then yes I do believe someone will steal it and try to profit from it. This therapy didn't work for me, but it was free!

 

[R. David Case]

Someone is going to see this and steal it and take credit for it, just watch.

I have it copyrighted so they will have to pay $500,000 first offense. I copyrighted it just so it would not be stolen and not to make money with it.

 

[R. David Case]

The coil size doesnt make the magnetic field larger you should know that. It's the voltage and current.

Well I was talking about frequency response in the magnetic spectrum.

 

[R. David Case]

Those who have read the thread in its entirety know that I tried this therapy (with the correct headphones) in early January this year. So almost a year has passed and I'm glad this thread has been gaining traction again, I feel this is one of the best things out there for tinnitus. Unfortunately I had to quit the therapy because of side effects (I was probably the only person out of hundreds who got any side effects, besides increase in tinnitus obviously). One can read about it here:

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...ked-out-my-tinnitus.33001/page-35#post-420399

I understand that Mr. Case has had experience with the Tinnitus Mix for almost 2 decades. With all due respect, I feel this advice is too generic. This is probably fine if you don't have hyperacusis. I had severe hyperacusis and reactivity when I tried Tinnitus Mix, both of which were worse to synthetic (meaning sounds from speakers or headphones) and even just a few minutes of 30 percent of volume would have probably done damage to my ears.

My suggestion is, especially if you have hyperacusis or even if you don't, why not start as low as possible, for short durations during the day and work your way up. From my experience and from what I understand, there's no downside to starting this low. I luckily was wise enough to do this from the start, I literally probably started with 1 percent and moved up to like 4 percent of full volume (my phone might have been higher volume by default too, I can easily make out words at 2 percent and I have an app for setting the volume very precisely).

I will repeat, my hyperacusis and reactivity used to be very severe and it's also important to bear in mind that they're much worse to synthetic sounds. Most people can probably go higher and even skip this step if they don't have hyperacusis. My main point is, there's no real downside to being extra careful. Obviously this is not some magic sound that doesn't damage the ears at any volume that you can try to listen to it no matter how loud and some people have a very low threshold for getting further damage. Also, different devices have different volumes for same percentages. I feel why some people don't have good results is they listen to it too loud. Be careful folks.

I'm contemplating taking a shot at this again, I still have my Koss headphones and my situation is much, much better than it used to be a year ago thanks to other alternative therapies I'm doing and I think the side-effects I got might have had something to do with a Magnesium deficiency. I probably won't but it's something that's on my mind.

Believe it or not I have had one other person experience twitching when using Tinnitus Mix, it was more than you describe but IT IS A GOOD SIGN. As Tinnitus Mix works on awakening neurons, they make and break connections as brain chemistry returns to normal. That process does cause skin sensations and twitching in about 1% of those that have HAD POSITIVE RESULTS, BUT IT GOES AWAY after using Tinnitus Mix as recommended.

She was a severe case and she got many benefits after a few weeks.

 

[R. David Case]

First of all, thanks @R. David Case for making this sound!

4 nights in. Unfortunately my tinnitus hasn't changed - if anything it has gotten somewhat worse. My tinnitus is very high pitched - maybe that has to do with it. I can sometimes even hear my tinnitus on the higher frequency while listening to the Tinnitus Mix.

I'm wondering whether super high pitched tinnitus requires a sound that has more high frequencies in it.

You can get more high frequencies out of Tinnitus Mix with an equalizer, I recorded Tinnitus Mix on a Sony UX-560 that has an equalizer, I then turned up high frequencies and turned down low frequencies, it works better faster than raw sound file.

 

[MRItechssuck]

Sidenote: The Boeing 717 is criminally loud!.

The Dc9/MD80/ B717 series of airplanes are some of the quietest old airplanes out there, unless you were sitting between the engines at the tail or possibly in near a boarding door, or emergency exit row, where the door seals may be old.

The frontal area of the B717 is relatively small, but it's an old plane. Newer airbuses, like the A380, A350 are comparably quiet, and the 777 isn't that bad. The B737 IS criminally loud thanks to Southwest's demands to keep every new model have the same nose design dating back to the B707.