I’ve spent the last decade mastering records every day. That means long hours of listening, plenty of late nights, and more than a few mornings where the world felt half a dB dimmer than it should. I used to treat that feeling as part of the job. It isn’t. The job is listening – and listening only works if we protect what makes all of this matter: Our ears. This isn’t a crusade or a lecture. It’s the quiet truth I wish someone had hammered into me when I started: Ears don’t grow back. You get a few thousand inner hair cells per ear – about the population of a small club – and they’re hired for life. Lose enough of them, or the synapses behind them, and the high end air you thought was “just the room today” never returns. Mix decisions start drifting. Masters get brittle. Translation slips. Eventually, you’re compensating for damage instead of hearing music. What follows is how I think about hearing now – as a mastering engineer who wants to do this for another 40 years, and as a human who would like to hear his partner whisper across a room at 70. It’s practical, not precious. I still love loud. I just want to love it longer.
Why Engineers are a Special Case
Most safety guidelines were written to keep factory workers from becoming hard of hearing – not to preserve a mastering engineer’s ability to hear a 1 dB shelf at 12 kHz. OSHA’s “safe” daily exposures (eight hours at 90 dB, four at 95 dB, and so on) bake in losses that would wreck our work. If you want to keep a career-grade ear, treat those numbers as a floor, not a goal. And time matters. Hearing fatigue is cumulative. The venues, the rehearsals, and the train rides with leaky earbuds – they all count. Damage often begins as synapse loss (the hidden part of hidden hearing loss), so an audiogram can look “normal” while fine detail tracking is already slipping. You can pass a speech test and still fail at music. Musicians and engineers show up again and again in studies with roughly four times the risk of noise-induced hearing loss, as well as more than 50 percent higher rates of tinnitus. We earn those odds the same way we earn our credits – by showing up every day around loud sound.
Level, Duration, and the Real-Life Line
Here’s the rule of thumb I use:
* 85 dB (busy traffic in the room): Fine for hours if your ears are fresh.
* 94 to 95 dB (amped rehearsal): Limit to about an hour without protection.
* 100 dB (small live room, drums nearby): 15 to 20 minutes is plenty.
* 110 dB (snare up close, PA sweet spot): One or two minutes, tops – then step back or get earplugs in.
A phone with the NIOSH Sound Level Meter app** gets you surprisingly close to the truth. More important than the number is the habit: Measure, adjust, and leave when you planned to instead of when your ears beg. If you have to raise your voice to be heard at arm’s length, it’s already too loud to hang unprotected. If you step outside and the world sounds soft, or your ears ring, that’s an overdraft on tomorrow – pay it back with quiet.
The Floyd Toole Lesson
If you’ve dug into loudspeaker research, you’ve met Dr. Floyd Toole. Working at the National Research Council of Canada and Harman International Industries, he showed that when you level match and blind listen to a set of monitors, sure thing favorites fall apart.
The point wasn’t humiliation; it was how quickly we adapt to bias. Your ears do the same. That tiny, permanent 6 to 8 kHz notch? You’ll compensate without noticing. That smear of distortion you can’t quite place? You’ll adjust the top end and call it taste. Unless you measure and reset, you end up mixing into your own damage. The fix is the same discipline Toole asked of monitors: Check, compare, and recalibrate.
* Get a proper audiogram (baseline, then annually) and ask for extended high frequency testing.
* Keep notes on your listening: Do cymbals feel brittle? Do s sounds wander? Does translation sharpen after a quiet day?
* If mix trends repeat across projects, assume your ear – not the world – moved.
We level-match our converters and limiters. We can level-match ourselves.
Protection that Doesn’t Kill the Joy
Foam earplugs are better than nothing, but they’re crude – they lop highs and shift balance. Better options are:
* Universal musician earplugs ($15 to $30): Flat-ish filters, and they’re easy to keep everywhere.
* Custom-molded earplugs ($115 to $200): The adult move. Swappable 9/15/25 dB filters, and comfortable for hours.
* IEMs [In-Ear Monitors] for stage: The quietest stage is the one you make. Try to run your IEMs as quietly as practically possible – they are better than stage level, but they’re still no friend to your hearing.
Technique matters. Seat earplugs deep – roll, lift the ear, relax jaw, and set them snug.
* Redundancy helps: Keep customs in the studio, universals on the keychain, and foam in the travel kit. The best plug is the one you actually have.
Studio Hygiene that Keeps You Honest
A few unsexy habits changed everything about how long I can work and how consistent my next-day masters sound.
* Work quieter than you think – around 78 to 82 dB C-weighted at the chair.
* Short predictable breaks: Ten minutes of silence every hour beats pushing through.
* Control the low end: Overhyped bass masks perception and accelerates fatigue.
* Alternate references: Switch from speakers to headphones, loud to quiet, to catch ear drift.
* Track exposure: Note “loud days” vs. “quiet days.” Reality checks itself.
None of this is glamorous. However, all of this is cheaper and better than losing your top octave of hearing.
Recovery is Part of the Job
Ears heal slowly – if you let them. After a heavy sound day, give yourself 18 to 24 hours of relative quiet. If you wake with a muffled tone or hiss in your head, that’s your system asking for a break. Sleep, hydrate, and breathe. You can’t hack your way out of damage, but you can set your body up to stop fighting itself. Quiet days aren’t indulgent; they’re the hidden half of consistency.
Talking to Bands and Clients
Telling a band to wear earplugs can sound like a lecture. Making it about sound works better:
* “Let’s get everyone custom earplugs so we can hear the snare transient instead of the room shouting back.”
* “Drop the stage SPL 6 dB and I can give you more detail in the vocal.”
* “Try these earplugs for two songs – see if the groove tightens.”
Engineers will do almost anything for better sound. Use that.
A Quick Word on Tinnitus
Tinnitus is common in our world, and the first big spike can feel catastrophic. It doesn’t have to be. The approach is the same as any other part of hearing care:
* Don’t chase silence with more sound. Masking to “hide” a ring often deepens fatigue.
* Respect stress – tinnitus and anxiety can reinforce each other. A small daily breathwork routine helps.
* See someone. A musician-minded audiologist can give you a plan instead of a shrug.
Most professionals will encounter some version of it across a career. The goal is to keep it boring – and keep your process consistent.
What I measure (and what I ignore)
* Measure: average SPL at the chair, show levels, loud-day count, annual audiograms.
* Ignore: online debates about exact limits for “creative” work. Everyone’s tolerance is different. Mine’s “hear 16 kHz when I’m old.”
Set your line, write it down, stay on the right side.
Why this Belongs in Tape Op
We talk about microphones and then treat the thing that actually turns air into music – the ear – as an afterthought. I’m a mastering engineer; I get paid to hear. If I lose that, there’s no plug-in that saves me, and there’s no model for the next generation if we glamorize damage over craft. Hearing protection isn’t a scold. It’s a craft choice. It’s how you hear whether that hi-hat needs half a dB or the chorus a breath more air. It’s how you keep loving loud music without pretending you don’t miss the fridge hum. Listening, at its core, is an ethic – precision, not sentiment. Protecting your ears keeps that ethic intact for decades. It’s the line between guessing and knowing, between working angry and working clear. Take care of the first instrument, and the rest of the rig makes sense.
Five Habits that Changed My Next-Day Masters
1. Custom earplugs in every pocket. Universals on the keychain. Foam in the glovebox.
2. 78 to 82 dB default listening level. Short loud checks only.
3. Ten minutes of silence each hour. No phone; just reset.
4. Track my loud days. Two per week = the next day is quiet.
5. Annual audiogram: Same clinic, same chain. Watch the trend, not the number.
None of these are heroic. All of them are consistent. Consistency builds a career – and keeps one.
If you’ve been putting off protecting your ears, start small. Order custom earplugs, download the NIOSH meter, set a calendar reminder for a hearing test, and take one quiet day after every loud one. You’ll feel the difference in a week, but you'll hear it in a month. I simply wish to be an old engineer who still loves cymbals. That’s the goal!
**National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health <cdc.gov/niosh/noise/about/app.html>
Alexander Wright is an independent mastering engineer and author based in Seattle, WA. <alexanderwright.com> 
