Yes, you should ignore people who tell you there's some magic difference between headphones and other audio sources, make your own decisions about what is safe and reasonable for you, and ignore advice from anyone on here you disagree with (including me) regardless of their post count and regardless of how many fancy words when they constantly repost the same totally unscientific information about headphones over and over, supported by a handful of anecdotes they claim to have received from people who may not even exist
There are a
lot of us on here who have had tinnitus for years or decades, still use headphones or play live music or drive racecars or whatever it is we do, and have found ways to make that work. We are disproportionately not represented in these threads for 2 reasons:
* people who are handling their tinnitus well enough to be playing a guitar on stage are almost certainly not sticking around here to post, with the exception of
@Tom Cnyc who pops his head up time to time.
* trying to have the same tired arguments about headphones over and over again with the same one or two people who are completely incapable of providing any rational scientific basis or peer-reviewed studies, but instead just copy/paste the same boring blobs about HEADPHONES REAL BAD! is super boring and unproductive. And, when such people hide behind silly arguments of "decorum" when their ideas are challenged -- that's a sign of someone who has no idea what they're talking about and is incapable of debating in good faith.
I am
not telling you to use headphones. I am telling you that I do, and I'm also telling you that you should be deeply suspicious of anything
anyone tells you on this subject because it's one of the most emotionally charged things people like to argue about here.
I only make this long winded post, because, from the cut of this thread you might assume "most people with tinnitus give up headphones forever!!!!!!!" and that's just, like, lol, completely untrue. Do some people with tinnitus continue to use headphones at too loud volumes and hurt their hearing worse? Of course! Do some people who drive too fast and hit a tree, continue to drive too fast and hit another tree! Of course!
The people who hit a tree once, realize it was a dumb thing to do, and then change their driving habits accordingly... well, they basically had a "boring" experience and might not have too much to say about it.
Final disclaimer: if any activity involving audio or noise, headphone related or not,
reliably seems to increase your tinnitus, you should absolutely take that as a sign you're doing something dangerous. It's pretty hard to make a decision like that from one "spike", though -- after 20 years, my tinnitus changes all the time, but it's got its own whims. Years of complete avoidance of headphones and basically any noise over 65db did not cause me any "healing", and now having returned to years of headphones as well as using all the loud engines my life requires (with earpro, of course) so far has not caused me any additional issues.
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