How loud is too loud?
Your ears don't care what the meter in your DAW says. A track peaking at −1 dBFS can be a whisper or a roar depending on where your monitor volume knob sits, so the number that decides whether you're doing damage is the sound level in the air at your ears, measured in dB SPL (sound pressure level).
Safety limits use dB(A), which is dB SPL with A-weighting applied. A-weighting is a filter that counts deep bass and the very top of the treble for less, roughly the way your ears hear at moderate levels. A sound level meter or a phone app set to A-weighting gives you a reading you can compare with the limits below.
The figure most limits start from is 85 dB(A) for 8 hours. The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommends it as a daily limit, and the UK's Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005 make hearing protection compulsory at a daily average of 85 dB(A). Neither says 84 is safe and 86 is dangerous. They're lines drawn where the risk of lasting hearing loss over a working life becomes too high to accept.
At the quiet end, the US Environmental Protection Agency put the level with no measurable effect on hearing at 70 dB averaged over a whole 24 hours, in 1974. Spread the same energy over an 8 hour day with silence the rest of the time and it comes to about 75 dB(A), which is the bottom of the mixing range this lesson suggests.
The 3 dB rule
Turning something up by 3 dB doubles the energy reaching your ears. The limits treat hearing damage as following the energy, so 3 dB louder for the same time counts as twice the dose, and the safe time halves. That trade is called the exchange rate, and NIOSH and the UK regulations both use 3 dB.
Start at 8 hours at 85 dB(A) and keep halving: 4 hours at 88, 2 hours at 91, 1 hour at 94, 30 minutes at 97 and 15 minutes at 100. At 110 dB(A), which a pair of large monitors or a club system can reach, the whole day's allowance is gone in about a minute and a half.
The trade works in your favour too. Turning down by 3 dB halves the dose for the same session, and a 3 dB change is easy to miss unless you flip straight between the two versions. Six decibels down quarters the dose, and the music still sounds like the same music.
Time trades the same way. One hour at 94 dB(A) is the same dose as 8 hours at 85. So a loud check is fine when it's short; the damage comes from loud sessions that run for hours.
The US workplace regulator, OSHA, uses a looser rule: 90 dB(A) for 8 hours with a 5 dB exchange rate. It dates from the 1970s, and NIOSH's 1998 criteria document recommends the stricter figures instead. Use the 85 dB(A) and 3 dB figures for your own ears.
| Level at your ears | NIOSH, per day | WHO, per week |
|---|---|---|
| 80 dB(A) | 25 h 24 min | 40 h |
| 85 dB(A) | 8 h | 12 h 39 min |
| 88 dB(A) | 4 h | 6 h 20 min |
| 91 dB(A) | 2 h | 3 h 11 min |
| 94 dB(A) | 1 h | 1 h 36 min |
| 97 dB(A) | 30 min | 48 min |
| 100 dB(A) | 15 min | 24 min |
| 106 dB(A) | 3 min 45 s | 6 min |
| 110 dB(A) | 1 min 29 s | 2 min 24 s |
Daily limits and weekly limits
Workplace limits are daily. They assume a working life of loud days with quiet evenings in between, and they reset every morning. The World Health Organization and the International Telecommunication Union took a different approach in their safe listening standard for personal audio, ITU-T H.870: a weekly allowance of 80 dB(A) for 40 hours, for adults. It's meant for music you choose to listen to and adds up every session in the week, which makes it stricter.
The two disagree more than you'd expect. Five 8 hour days at 85 dB(A) are exactly on the NIOSH limit, and the same week is more than three times the WHO allowance. A producer who mixes all day and then listens to music on the way home is closer to the WHO picture, because the listening doesn't stop when the work does. If you want one number to aim for, aim for the WHO one.
Apple uses the WHO figure. An iPhone keeps a log of headphone levels in the Health app and can warn you when you pass the weekly allowance, and its readings are most accurate with Apple and Beats headphones.
How loud should you mix?
Loud monitoring is tempting for a reason. In 1933 Harvey Fletcher and Wilden Munson at Bell Labs measured how loud tones at different frequencies sound at different levels, and later measurements of the same equal-loudness curves are now standardised as ISO 226. They explain a lot: at quiet levels your ears are much less sensitive to bass and the very top of the treble than to the midrange, and that gap shrinks as the level goes up. Turn a mix up and it sounds fuller and more exciting, even though the mix hasn't changed. That's why every session drifts louder if you let it.
Spend most of a session at about 75 to 80 dB(A) at your seat. That's loud enough to hear detail and reverb tails, and quiet enough to do all day. Turn up for short checks of the low end and of how the track hits, then come back down. Check at a very low level too: if the vocal and the kick still come through when the track is barely audible, the balance is right.
Matching levels when you compare also keeps the volume from creeping. If you A/B a plug-in or a reference track that's louder than your mix, you'll keep turning everything up to compete. Matching by LUFS removes that pull, and the LUFS lesson explains how.
How to set a safe monitoring level
You only need to do this once per room, and it gives you a mark on the volume knob you can always come back to.
- Get a meterA real sound level meter is best. NIOSH's free Sound Level Meter app for iPhone is a reasonable stand-in; set any app to A-weighting and slow response if it lets you.
- Play something you know wellUse a finished, mastered track, since that's as loud as anything you'll play. Sit where you mix and hold the meter at head height.
- Find the knob position for about 80 dB(A)Watch the average reading over the loud part of the track, ignoring the brief jumps, and set the monitor volume so it sits around 80.
- Mark itA strip of tape on the volume knob or the monitor controller is enough. That's your home position for the rest of the session.
- Match your headphones by earHeadphones are hard to measure without proper equipment, so switch between them and the speakers and set the headphones to sound about the same.
Studios that need repeatable levels calibrate with pink noise instead of music. Bob Katz's K-System sets each monitor to 83 dB SPL for pink noise at −20 dBFS RMS, for example. The pink noise source in the lab above is the same kind of signal.
Headphones and earbuds
The same limits apply. What counts is the level at your eardrum, and headphones can easily put 100 dB(A) or more there. They also hide the clues that something is loud: nobody else hears it, and a sealed earcup keeps a high level feeling comfortable for longer than it should.
On a train or a plane, the background noise pushes you to turn music up until it drowns the rumble out. Noise-cancelling headphones or well-sealed in-ear monitors deal with the rumble directly, so the music can stay lower. Phones sold in Europe also warn you when you turn headphones up past a set point; leave that on.
Earplugs for gigs and rehearsals
Gigs, clubs and band rehearsals are where most musicians take their biggest doses. WHO's 2022 standard for safe listening venues and events puts the ceiling at 100 dB(A) averaged over any 15 minutes, and at that level NIOSH's daily allowance lasts 15 minutes.
Foam earplugs block a lot of sound and cost almost nothing, but they cut the treble far more than the bass, so music through them sounds muffled and people take them out. Filtered musician's earplugs use a small acoustic filter to turn everything down by roughly the same amount, so the music sounds like itself, only quieter. They come in strengths of about 9, 15 and 25 dB, sold off the shelf or made from a mould of your ear canal by an audiologist. Fifteen decibels takes a 100 dB(A) gig down to 85 at your ears, and a 3 hour night drops from twelve times the daily limit to 38% of it.
The figure on the packet assumes a perfect fit. In real use, a plug that isn't pushed in far enough can lose a big share of its rating, so follow the fitting instructions and check that the music drops evenly when you put them in.
Tinnitus and other warning signs
Inside the cochlea, rows of hair cells turn vibration into nerve signals. Loud sound wears them out, and in humans they don't grow back. The first sign is usually temporary: after a loud night your hearing feels dull or muffled, and you may hear ringing or hissing that isn't there, which is tinnitus. That temporary dullness, called a temporary threshold shift, normally recovers within a day or two.
Recovering doesn't mean nothing happened. In 2009, Sharon Kujawa and Charles Liberman showed in mice that noise loud enough to cause only a temporary shift could still permanently destroy many of the connections between hair cells and the hearing nerve. That kind of damage doesn't show on a standard hearing test, and in people it's thought to make speech in noisy places harder to follow.
Repeated exposure leads to permanent loss. Noise damage usually shows up first as a dip around 4 kHz on a hearing test, the range where a lot of consonants and cymbals sit, before it spreads. See an audiologist if you notice any of these:
- ringing or muffled hearing after a session or a gig
- needing the monitors louder than you used to for the same mix
- struggling to follow a conversation in a busy room
- everyday sounds suddenly seeming painfully loud
If you work with sound, get a hearing test anyway, so you have a baseline to compare with later. If you lose hearing suddenly in one ear, see a doctor the same day; sudden hearing loss is treated as urgent because treatment works best when it starts early.
Protecting your hearing in the studio
The volume mark from the steps above does most of the work. A few more habits cover the rest:
- Rest your ears for a few minutes every hour or so. Tired ears also make worse mix decisions, so the break pays for itself.
- Put a limiter on your master channel while you do sound design. Feedback in a delay, a resonant filter sweep or a broken plug-in can jump to full scale in a fraction of a second, and the delay feedback lesson shows how fast a loop can run away.
- Turn the monitors down before you open a session or load a preset.
- Take headphones off while you change anything in the signal chain.
Common mistakes
Judging loudness by the DAW meter
Digital meters show the level of the file. How loud it is in the room depends on the monitor volume, so a quiet-looking meter tells you nothing about your ears. Measure the room once and mark the knob.
Turning up to make a mix sound better
Louder always sounds fuller for a minute, because of the way your ears respond. If a mix only works loud, the balance needs fixing, and turning up hides the problem while adding to your dose.
Trusting your ears to say when it's too loud
Your ears adapt over a session, so a level that felt loud at the start feels normal two hours later. Go back to the knob mark after every loud check instead of deciding by feel.
Waiting for ringing before doing anything
Ringing means the damage is already happening. The limits in this lesson are there to keep you below that point.
Training your ears to hear level changes
The quiz under the lab plays the loop at full level and then turned down by 1, 3, 6 or 10 dB, with the screens covered, and asks you to pick the gap. It shows how small 3 dB sounds even though it halves your dose, and once you can pick the steps out, turning down by a few decibels stops feeling like a loss. Your best score is saved in your browser.
Questions people ask
How loud is 85 dB?
Roughly as loud as heavy traffic heard from the pavement. In a studio it's music loud enough that you'd have to raise your voice to talk to someone next to you. A phone app set to A-weighting will give you a rough reading in your own room.
Can tinnitus go away?
Ringing after a single loud night often fades within a day or two, as the temporary damage recovers. Tinnitus that's still there after a few months is less likely to go away completely, though for many people it becomes less noticeable over time. See a GP or an audiologist if it doesn't settle within a few days.
Are headphones worse for your hearing than speakers?
At the same level at your ears, no. The dose depends on the sound pressure reaching your eardrum, however it gets there. Headphones make it easier to listen loud for a long time without anyone noticing, and they block out the room that would otherwise remind you how loud it is.
Do noise-cancelling headphones protect your hearing?
They help on trains and planes, because cancelling the background rumble means you don't need to turn the music up to hear it. They don't limit how loud the music itself is, so the volume is still up to you.
What volume should I mix at?
Most of the time, around 75 to 80 dB(A) at your seat, which is loud enough to hear detail and quiet enough to last a full day. Turn up briefly to check the low end and how the track hits, then come back down.
Does hearing damage heal?
Temporary dullness after loud listening does recover, usually within a day or two. The hair cells that die from noise don't grow back in humans, and there's no treatment yet that restores them, which is why the limits are set before damage shows up.