I set up 3 parallel tracks and listened to several hours of music. In track 1 we have my friend Minnie, who has perfect hearing. In the middle is me, with moderately severe impairment, vTuning = 60 dB.
And on the other side is my friend Max, who has terrible hearing with a vTuning = 80 dB. That’s the limit of my ability to correct hearing for anyone. One step beyond means profound deafness, so Max really has it pretty bad.
But Max loves music as much or more than I do. In fact, he probably made his living with music.
Both Max and I are running a pair of Crescendo engines to handle our severe corrections. Minnie needs none at all. We have been listening for a couple of hours to albums which really make our Crescendo units work their asses off – Enya. Lot’s of lush, layered, smeared, female vocals. That’s the toughest job for Crescendo, but it handles it just fine.
[ I still can’t get over the fact that I can run so many Crescendo systems all at once. You wouldn’t believe the expense that would have taken 10 years ago… This is all running on a little Mac Mini from two years ago.]
So here are our records of dosimetry for these past 2 hours:
That’s Max on top, me in the middle, and Minnie on the bottom. She has absolutely no problems listening to this stuff. Her dose still reads 0%. And we were all listening together at loud & comfortable levels, -23 LUFS = 73 dBSPL.
I have a minor amount of dosing, at 3%. So I could go on doing this for another 60 solid hours before I need to hang it up.
Max, is running about 4 times ahead of me, at 12%. That makes sense since he is running about 6 dB more intense than me. But even Max could go on for another 14 hours straight before he needs to give it a rest.
In fact, I never even saw Max’s RMS levels go above 12 dB on the scale, which is 85 dBSPL. At peaks he was hitting 8-10 dB, or 81-83 dBSPL.
So this is real proof, on real music, that Crescendo probably isn’t dangerous to anyone’s hearing. I never had these kinds of objective facts before. Now we do.
So if you are timid about trying Crescendo because you are afraid of damaging your hearing even more, fear not. Just make sure you set up a correct audio calibration before diving in. Crescendo will look out for you.
- DM
