In that case do you have any ideas what could be causing this distortion and weird tracking of frequencies? The low-freq loss is annoying, as is the tinnitus, but the distortion physically hurts when things get loud.
Left ear low frequency loss and distortion.
Diagnosis nerve damage.
The problem with that diagnosis, which very well may be right, is that it doesn’t tell me anything. This started a year ago, during lockdown, the quietest months of my adult life, when I wasn’t sick or otherwise undergoing any health problems.
Any ideas what might have caused the damage?
Very few people find out why they become hard of hearing / deaf.
Does the distortion/frequency shifting at least sound like anything known? I’d feel better if I at least knew what the name was.
Not sure what caused it.
No one really ever told me what may have caused it .
In my case may have been work related.
Used to do commercial refrigeration.
Lots of big noisy compressors, fans.
Also used a lot of noisy tools.
To be honest no one really seemed to care.
The last ENT I went to wanted me to go to a different doctor for maybe an MRI.
I never followed up.
I don’t know maybe I will one day.
I tinker with kegerators now and then. Replacing a compressor on a commercial reach in now, Hoshizaki.
35 years can’t tell you how many compressors I replaced.
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Just to be clear, I work in audio and was taught at an early age to wear earplugs in loud environments and have done so, religiously, for 25 years. This condition came on during lockdown, when there were no shows and I didn’t even own speakers, so my concern was actually that it was caused by a lack of loud sound rather than too much.
So, to be clear, it’s 100% not caused by any kind of abuse. There’s no family history of it that I know of, at least not on my mom’s side, and nothing showed on an MRI.
I do often feel some kind of physical sensation around my ear on the left that I’ve never felt on the right and I feel like it’s related to the hearing loss but, again, the MRI didn’t show anything different.
I’m the only one in my family that is hard of hearing. Also my MRI was clear. Very few people find out why they become deaf or hard of hearing.
All kind of hearing loss in my family.
Brother, sister, mom. Pretty sure dad but he never wore aids.
I’m the only one with low frequency loss.
Was also told low frequency loss can be genetic.
Beats me.
Left eat absolutely sucks.
Bad tinnitus plus distortion.
Why, don’t know.
I wouldn’t drive myself crazy over why.
Not worth it.
Just do what you have to do to help your hearing the best you can.
Something I noticed yesterday: when I hum I hear no distortion and the frequency response is perfectly even across both ears, right down to the lowest note I can hum, which is fairly low since I’m a baritone/tenor.
If it was sensorineural hearing loss that should also apply to the sound of my own voice, no? In which case the lowest notes would be in my “good” ear only?
I have an ENT appointment in a week and I’m thinking it would be good to do some more testing there.
It’s not noise damage.
It could be some weirdy form of otosclerosis, but; there’s no Carhart Notch and the asymmetrical nature would indicate otherwise.
I’d go with a loss of cochlear function, which could indicate calcification of the deeper parts of the cochlear (again Asym?). Dead(ish)region of the basilar membrane or fluid loss to the innermost part of the cochlear.
Have you been bashed on that side of the head?; Perlilymph fistula occurs when the leverage of the mass of the ossicles tears a gap in the tissue at the footplate of the stapes.
The loss of 40dB of Hearing is fairly significant too; this is indicative that the ‘cochlear tuning’ outer/inner hair cell function has been impaired.
If you have good insurance as with all forms of SN Asymmetry, you might want to get a scan done just to check that there’s nothing acting on your retro-cochlear function that’s going to get worse.
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No head bashing, at least not in the last 25 years. I played rugby in my teens but didn’t get smacked around much.
What’s “SN Asymmetry”?
Also: still wondering this…
Googling will help you……
I googled “SN Asymmetry” before I posted.
I suggest you try it yourself and if the answer is obvious from those results then please enlighten us who don’t already know it.
I’m assuming they mean “sensorineural asymmetry” - meaning the loss is sensorineural and not symmetric between your ears.
Yours is definitely not a typical hearing loss. It seems odd that is just came on suddenly - maybe it was caused by a viral infection of the cochlea? I’m not an ENT; just an audiologist.
I wouldn’t think otosclerosis - that tends to follow a different pattern, such as this - looks conductive except for 2kHz (this is the Carhart’s notch mentioned earlier):
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Thanks for the reply. It might be from a viral infection - the chart you posted is definitely not how I’m hearing.The ENTs didn’t seem to think it was viral, though they haven’t been able to tell me what it would be, so I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out…
Not to harp on about this, but if my loss is sensorineural and down 40 db in the whole range of a male voice, why doesn’t my humming skew right like anything that enters my ears does?
When I google it it just tells me “deaf [as in sensorineurally deaf] people don’t hear their own humming”, which sounds promising, since my humming sounds exactly like it did before any of this started.
Maybe I have what Beethoven had. Good musical lineage there…
Your humming is not a Pure-tone signal. There will be elements of it above 750Hz, which you can hear bilaterally.
The intensity of the delivery of your own sound (partially delivered by bone conduction) is also much higher level than you think but your stapeadal reflex kicks in to reduce it.
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Well, now you’re speaking my language:
I agree there. When, for example, I record my voice singing low notes, say 150hz, and play them back I indeed can’t hear the fundamental in my left ear but my brain reconstructs it from the overtones and the signal in my right ear. It’s an amazing testiment to the power of the brain.
That said, I’m a recording engineer with 20 years experience so I’m pretty used to spotting differences between L & R, I can definitely tell a difference when listening to that playback through headphones, for example.
In contrast, when I hear my voice through my head, with ears plugged, I hear zero difference whatsoever. Totally dead-centre mono from the lowest to the highest notes of my range. No dips, no bumps, and most importantly no distortion. It’s very possible in the lower midrange, like 150-250hz it’s actually a touch louder, like 1-2db, on the left. But if so it’s pretty subtle.
The discrepancy between the two experiences seems weird, no?
In terms of the stapeadal reflex, that term’s new to me, but interesting, and makes sense anecdotally from my training and exposure to loud sounds. Am I right in thinking it’s an overall adjustment of volume, not variable by frequency, and is the same in both ears?