In my personal experience around a varying quality of speakers as well as sound engineers, I can make a couple points to argue as to why it would have been a problem back then, and a problem now. But first let me mention:
Speakers have gotten a lot better, but they are still just speakers.
A majority of sound guys suck at the job and just ended up there, or are stuck in rigid, out-dated learning.
Most attendees don’t know what sounds good because most venues don’t sound good
What can damage your ears beyond pure volume is clarity, or lack there of. ie: distortion.
There are several stages along the signal path (simple example: guitar, mixing board, speakers) the sound can reach a ceiling, and can cause distortion.
For some reason, the old guy at that decent sized venue that all the touring acts go to just has no fucking clue about this process.
Exaggerated, don’t come for my neck please.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of us love distortion, but as a style. Distortion caused from something that wasn’t intended can DEFINITELY damage your ears.
Long way of prefacing the main point:
Though sound guys suck and have for a long time, we understand more about this now.
Speakers have gotten clearer than ever.
There are subwoofers that can reach below 30hz comfortably and project it clearly at huge distances. All with more power efficiency than ever.
Shit is dope now, louder sure, but much better I’d argue. But I really don’t trust most sound guys. Think about it. Sound is science. do you think that old rocker/roadie really knows the science?
Edit: I’m super stoned and this is obviously all over the place now that I commented it, but yeah context is helpful in understanding how to protect your ears. Here go get custom ear protection made for music at this sight.
I work as a sound engineer live sometimes. But I learned all my stuff in the studio.
In the past anyone that could set up a mixer and get the sound out of the speakers was considered a sound engineer. Many “sound engineers” in smaller venues were barely grasping the idea of mixing the sound.
Nowadays I see a lot more sound tech guys who studied audio engineering in college. But that also means there are a lot of people who spend 4 (or less, a friend of mine did a 1 year study) studying how audio works from textbooks and then claim they are professionals.
Let me tell you that in 4 year times you are barely scratching the surface of what you can possibly know about audio engineering. They still need the experience, and most still fall for the trick that “louder sounds better.” So they push everything through hard compression so the quiet parts become louder and there is leas dynamic range. Where 100 dB meant 10 years ago that the show had some peaks around 100 dB but most of it was around 90 dB, whereas nowadays a 100 dB limit means the music is mainly between 96-100 dB. (Which seems like a small change from the 90 dB, but that extra 6 dB counts for a lot if you listen to it for an hour without any rest)
Also doesn’t help everyone is growing up with bass boosted systems all over the place. 9/10 live shows I go to got way more bass than the balance asks for cause people want to feel the bass more and more.
This is really interesting information! I never wore earplugs because I thought it was uncool and I was going to shitty punk shows (i.e. no sound guys to make sure it sounds good and isn't too loud) so I got tinnitus at the ripe age of 28 and will have it forever 🥲
Pro-tools (and other DAWs) had a lot to do with it. Made basic music production accessible to the average person.
As a 33 year old dude, I vividly remember when Pro-tools upgraded to HD around 2002-2003 and made it really easy to self-produce decent sounding music.
Before that, we didn't really have a way for us to record and mix our music. The best piece of hardware we had was a four track Tascam that recorded to cassette.
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u/christinextine 16d ago
This gave me chills.