Protect Your Ears!

Our ears are one of the most important organs we have in our bodies. It is responsible for several things that impact how we function daily such as: balance, localizing, and most importantly listen!
Our ears contain a liquid that helps us sense whether we are standing upright, upside-down or bending over. They also help us locate where sounds are coming from, our brains can process the milliseconds that it takes for a sound to get from one ear to another which allows us to know in what direction a sound came from. Most importantly our ears are what got you to most likely want to read the reviews on this site, because you love sound and want to make music or audio sound better!

            Julian Treasure is an expert on sound, and I recently watched one of his TED talks about how important it is for us to protect our ears. He opens up his speech with a very interesting fact about the dynamic range that the human ear can hear at. A bold point that Julian made was that ears are not made for hearing but for listening. The difference between listening and hearing is that when you are listening you are taking in information and processing that information in your brain, whereas, hearing is more passive and doesn’t require any effort from our brain really.

            Today most of us experience noise because we live in cities or by highways or work in busy parts of town, etc. All this noise has had harmful effects on our health by causing some of us to be sleep deprived because we can’t fully sleep at night because of all the noise. The noise has also caused us to “mask” the noise with music played through our headphones this however has also been abused and in turn has caused more health problems and have caused most people by the time they reach their freshman year of college to already be hearing impaired.

            We should all take care of our ears; try to imagine what your world would be like without sound. Just like we need to relax our ears do to, Julian advises that we should seek out some noises that will relax our ears such as wind, water, or birds. And when we listen to music we should listen to it in the nicest pair of headphones we can afford to not sacrifice the quality of the audio and to also eliminate the external noise that causes us to listen to our music so loud.