How loud is your car? Is it affecting your hearing?

I just bought a decibel meter. Should come in this week. I have the mods in my sig of course and will be testing to see exactly how loud this car is. The boominess is nasty and I almost considered getting quieter mufflers at one point and then back out b/c I just love that flowmaster sound. I will report back to y'all..

I have seen some of the decibel ratings in the flows. It's like 93 decibels@2k rpm and 115 and wot. But may depend on the car. I am feeling pain literally @2k RPM. If you don't, it may be because you already have hearing loss.

Here's some stats for you that are important:

Decibel levels can also be misleading. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, decibels increase logarithmically so that each 10 decibels is perceived to be twice as loud as the last. For instance, a blender or lawn mower at 90 decibels is eight times louder than normal conversation at 60 decibels. (Condor, Chicago Tribune, 1998)

In a 1998 article in the Chicago Tribune, Dr. Ronald A. Hoffman, Director of Otology (diseases of the ear) at New York University Medical Center said that a growing number of his patients are young people. “Each person is different,” said Hoffman, but regular exposure of more than one minute to 110 decibels can create permanent hearing loss in 1 minute and 29 seconds. More than 15 minutes at 100 decibels is equally hazardous” (Condor, Chicago Tribune, 1998).

"No one should be exposed to 90 dB of noise over an 8-hour period. With each increase of 5 dB, the amount of time exposed to this noise level is divided in half. In other words, a rock concert where the dB level is at 120 can cause hearing damage instantaneously(edit - had it wrong). Rock concerts at full tilt can spike to 150 dB! "

(basically prolonged exposure to levels of 85 DB and above will damage ears, so more- some less and it does add up over time even if it is not a constant 8 hours or 15 minutes/etc..

With the h-pipe, the 40 series still droned like hell and not a pleasant drone either. Sounded cool though.

WhiteStallionGT said:

I think my loud music is making me deaf. I have to make it loud because of the exhaust.

Click to expand...

I am also wondering what decibels I am used to with the radio on in "spirited mode." You know. When you get in the car the next morn and you jump outta yer seat! Cman, your dumps are what will make it loud fer sure. I had a big car with glass packs back in college. It wasn't nearly as boomy as these flows and I imagine it was a lot more insulated too.

Here's some more. remember 85 db is considered the point at which you need to wear hearing protection. 110db can cause damage anywhere from immediately to within 1.5 minutes. 120 decibels can easily cause permanent damage immediately:

Points of Reference *measured in dBA or decibels

0 The softest sound a person can hear with normal hearing

10 normal breathing

20 whispering at 5 feet

30 soft whisper

50 rainfall

60 normal conversation

110 shouting in ear

120 thunder


Home
50 refrigerator

50 - 60 electric toothbrush

50 - 75 washing machine

50 - 75 air conditioner

50 - 80 electric shaver

55 coffee percolator

55 - 70 dishwasher

60 sewing machine

60 - 85 vacuum cleaner

60 - 95 hair dryer

65 - 80 alarm clock

70 TV audio

70 - 80 coffee grinder

70 - 95 garbage disposal

75 - 85 flush toilet

80 pop-up toaster

80 doorbell

80 ringing telephone

80 whistling kettle

80 - 90 food mixer or processor

80 - 90 blender

80 - 95 garbage disposal

110 baby crying

110 squeaky toy held close to the ear

135 noisy squeeze toys

Work

40 quiet office, library

50 large office

65 - 95 power lawn mower

80 manual machine, tools

85 handsaw

90 tractor

90 - 115 subway

95 electric drill

100 factory machinery

100 woodworking class

105 snow blower

110 power saw

110 leafblower

120 chain saw, hammer on nail

120 pneumatic drills, heavy machine

120 jet plane (at ramp)

120 ambulance siren

125 chain saw

130 jackhammer, power drill

130 air raid

130 percussion section at symphony

140 airplane taking off

150 jet engine taking off

150 artillery fire at 500 feet

180 rocket launching from pad
Recreation

40 quiet residential area

70 freeway traffic

85 heavy traffic, noisy restaurant

90 truck, shouted conversation

95 - 110 motorcycle

100 snowmobile

100 school dance, boom box

110 disco

110 busy video arcade

110 symphony concert

110 car horn

110 -120 rock concert

112 personal cassette player on high

117 football game (stadium)

120 band concert

125 auto stereo (factory installed)

130 stock car races

143 bicycle horn

150 firecracker

156 capgun

157 balloon pop

162 fireworks (at 3 feet)

163 rifle

166 handgun

170 shotgun

"Well as far as hearing loss its not dependent upon the decibels but does have some effect. It also has to do with the pitch and tone of the noise. "

I think I understand what you are saying 95WhiteVenom. Just to make sure we are not misleading anyone, it is a scientific fact that hearing loss is directly related to decibels. Meaning, regardles of the pitch or bass or whatever, if you are subjected to certain level decibels, you are going to suffer hearing loss.

You are saying that Pitch and Bass intensified can simply make the effects AMPLIFIED. Meaning it could take less decibels to do the same damage. I have not looked into it. It may be that when it is amplified, the decibels go higher anyway. Good question...

HAHA! This db meter is pretty cool! I can fart 80 decibels! Just kidding. I haven't measured that yet.

The stang starts up it is 95.6 decibels at 6 feet behind the car. I will test drive tonight.

That noisey arse vaccuum cleaner holds a steady 90-103+ decibels. That's really bad (103 db with your ear to the front on the floor, 85-90 at handle pushing it). The maximum a sound can be is 194 decibels which will prob cause permantent hearing loss instantly and probably knock you out cold.

Results:

Startup is 95.6 decibels in side the car. Idle is 72 decibels. The drone averages between 87-93 decibels in the drivers seat. Over time this is not goo for your ears. I have sensitive hearing and that is very annoying to me which is why I have gone back and forth between getting rid of the 40's. It goes right down inside my ear and gets on my nerves. Everyone is different. I start to feel pain around 83/84 db. Made my mind up, and putting on the quieter mufflers.

professional equipment.com. This one is not a cheap one from radio-shack. It has all kinds of tuning you can play with but I picked it up for $84 shipped. But yes you are right and I set it to auto adjust for hetz in relation to A (effect in relation to human hearing and not machinery setting) not C frequencies which is what you want. 1 Hz is one oscellation per second.

p.s. the best meter is your ear. If it hurts it's not good! Funny but true. You get desensitized though like a frog in a frying pan.

" There are other issues. Things -- you just mentioned some: masking, issues of duration. Sometimes there can be very annoying tones or pitches -- pitch effects. Everybody knows that it bothers you to hear the screeching on the chalkboard. Okay, that just happens to be a particular frequency that people don't like.

Let me expand on this a little bit. This is sort of showing the issue of frequencies. There is a little model of a keyboard here just to give you the feeling for human hearing. In some sense, these numbers here are the sensitivities of hearing, how well you can hear, so that there are certain notes at the low end that you don't hear as well and certain notes that you hear very well. Okay. So this is what I meant by it's not uniform over the frequency spaces -- certain tones that you can hear.

As a result, one of the things you have to do-- This is data that is used to convert how noisy a particular frequency is. So this is both the sound pressure level and the frequency. And these are what are called contours of equivalent noisiness. Okay. Okay.

Now, as I said, because we vary in sensitivity, one of the things that is done -- and you probably see this -- is something called an A-weighted decibel. And what you do here is you essentially look at the amount of power, amount of intensity of the noise, and you correct for it by how well the humans hear roughly. Okay. So this is, again, just looking at the physiology of the ear. So sometimes you'll see the noise given to you in sound pressure level. Okay. Sometimes you'll see the noise given to you in what's called dBA, or decibels that have been corrected for the sensitivity of the ear. Okay.

Again, these are some of the physiological or psychological effects of noise. Physiologically, you'll get hearing loss above certain levels. Above 85 decibels, you can get either temporary or permanent loss of hearing depending on the frequency and how long you hear it. So if you sit next to a machine for your entire career listening to the 85 decibels, okay, you might have a problem. A lot of older pilots have this problem at certain frequencies because they sat in airplanes that were generating tones at certain frequencies. At above 120 decibels, threshold of pain -- at 180 decibels, you'll pop your eardrums. Okay, just for the measure there.

When you have noise, you can have task performance degradation, you can have difficulty recognizing speech, there's a problem with sleep interruption, and there, of course, is a problem with annoyance."