earplugs

i too have tinnitus, in my left ear, i think stemming from a two-week run of nightly punk shows in a club about the size of my living room.

i worry about it sometimes, as i remember seeing pete townshend on t.v. when i was younger saying that his tinnitus was so bad that sometimes he wanted to kill himself.

tinnitus doesn't affect my quality of life that much now but i don't really know if it worsens over time naturally (with the deterioration of one's ears with age) so i worry about that.

so any mission of burma fans out there? roger miller quit music due to extreme tinnitus ... poor bastard. does anyone have more information about his hearing or his decision to quit music because of it? i know when they play live now he wears huge earmuffs and the drummer is behind a plexiglass sound barrier. is he just paranoid now? is it really that unbearable? i'm curious.

I usually go with the cylindrical flesh-colored foam drugstore jobbers that promise a 29-dB reduction. They make everything but the bass more diffuse, and I have a hard time hearing lyrics, but I'd rather enjoy music (and hearing in general) the rest of my days than enjoy it at full volume for another couple of years. I will occasionally buy some brand that's more tapered and neon-green in a pinch, but they don't seem to work as well, they don't feel as if they fit securely in place for some reason, and you end up walking around with big globs of neon green in your ears.

A friend who does catering for big touring bands has been fitted for the fancy muso kind, and she said she liked them, but keeps losing them. If you lose the cheapo disposable kind, you're not out $150.

The loudest band I've ever seen was Oneida, playing at top volume in a small room. I didn't have my earplugs with me, and had to hightail it out of there as fast as I could. (I later saw them, with earplugs, in a large room, and quite liked them.)

Also, some group called Shag who opened up for Tribe Called Quest back in 1996, and who were painfully loud. And there was a one-off noise band called Necropedophilia. I ran sound for them, to boot; I think I ended up outside at several points, which was fine, as within about five minutes, the band and I were the only people left in the venue...

10. MANOWAR The Conanist American heavy metal band (they‘re apparently big in Germany) claimed the title of world’s loudest band when a 1994 show in Hanover concert hit 129.5 decibels. For that show, the self-described Brothers of Metal used 10 tons of amplifiers--bathed in the blood of their enemies, no doubt.

EQUIPMENT Ten tons of amplifiers at the Hanover concert

WHY SO DARN LOUD? Joey DeMaio (bassist): "Some assholes tried to break our record and couldn't do it. Quite frankly, it just can't be done. All the gear we brought, all the power we use, it just can't be done. The power will just kill you. The Guinness Book of World Records wouldn't list it because they thought it would be dangerous, encouraging people to break it."

HOW LOUD? DeMaio: "One girl said to me the reason there's so many girls at a Manowar concert, more than any other Heavy Metal band in the world, is because the vibration of the bass travels through the floor, up their toes, up their ankles, up their legs and hits their fucking clit and they're just cumming through the whole concert!"

Helena Solodor (audiologist): "As you’re approaching 140 decibels, that’s the threshold of pain. With noise levels in excess of 140, 150 decibels, things can rupture. Your eardrums can burst. You could have all kinds of bodily functions go... It would not be pleasurable!"

PARDON? Eric Adams (vocals): "I don't wear earplugs in both ears, 'cos if I did I couldn't hear any high-end, which I need as a vocalist." Hearing of the band is reportedly still okay.

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING 6.5 (penalized 3.5 points for pandering)

9. VANILLA FUDGE The Vanilla Fudge’s over-the-top-and-through-the-valley psychedelic whiteboy soul didn’t know when to stop--either at a sign that said ‘This way: Prog" or at normal concert volume levels. Armed with Mark Stein’s Hammond B-3 organ, a clutch of ridiculously arranged songs, and a host of amps, the Fudge gained a late-‘60s reputation as one of America’s most histrionic--and loudest--rock n roll bands.

EQUIPMENT Tim Bogert (bassist): "The Hammond had two Leslies and a couple of amps that went through several cabinets as well. It just grew and kept growing, volume-wise. Amps kept getting piled up, cabinets kept getting piled up, and the venues got bigger and bigger."

WHY SO DARN LOUD? Bogert: "We were all deaf and having a wonderful time! Men in their 20s doing things they do. It was a period where people were very heavily into LSD--[the audience] would do all sorts of things _to the volume_. So the volume was a tool of part of the show--if we did something really dramatic and the crowd went ‘whooooooa’, we’d keep it in the show."

HOW LOUD? Wayne Kramer (MC5): "That Hammond B-3 that they had a special rig for? That could get pretty loud." Bogert: "We were one of the loudest bands--at that time. We’d do whisper-soft passages that would crescendo and you the audience would literally _move_ to the volume! You could see 10 to 20,000 people puff up, move down, swirl..."

PARDON? Bogert: "Tinnitus, big time. That’s the price you pay for having a darn good time. Nothing’s free!" Helena Solodor (audiologist): "Tinnitus is frequency-specific, often, and it’s generally a high-pitched tone that’s either constant or intermittent, and will usually subside after you’re away from noise for a period of time. With repeated noise hazards, that temporary shift becomes permanent."

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 7

8. HAWKWIND The early-’70s live lineup of space bikers on acid, led by guitarist singer Dave Brock and featuring Dikmik on bizarro effects and future Motorheadbanger Lemmy on bass, accessed rarely-traversed parts of the brain. The band’s legendary Chuck Berry-on-metal riffing and live frequency oscillations (as well as author-fuzzball Michael Moorcock’s cosmic ruminations) were deep-frozen in wax on 1973’s Space Ritual.

EQUIPMENT Sound oscillators, sound generators and directional electro voice speakers designed and built by the Evil Dik Mik.

WHY SO DARN LOUD? Dave Brock (leader/guitarist): "We used to get quite spaced out, you know, and having these speakers blaring out behind you... well, it was all jolly exciting!"

HOW LOUD? Brock: "We used to use sound oscillators ....Y ou know when you get sounds-- pitches, crossover--and they sort of distort? Well, they distort the air as well, so if you’re whacking stuff out, they really used to CUT. You could actually _feel_ it in your body. At one point we were threatened with being sued cuz a lot of people were getting ill..." Lemmy (Hawkwind bassist): "We used to give people epileptic fits."

PARDON? Brock: "I can’t hear crickets, or certain tones, and when there’s an awful lot of people talking at the same time, it’s hard to actually hear what anybody’s saying."

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 7.5

7. TED NUGENT/AMBOY DUKES In late-‘60s Detroit, Ted Nugent was in a weird place: instead of being a bowhunting good ol’ boy playing country music for his natural audience of midwestern red-blooded rednecks, he was a young longhair playing obnoxious guitar in a post-Sam & Dave troglodyte-rock band for thousands of stoned & sunbaked hippies. But being in a weird place never stopped The Nuge--he just turned his Fender louder, to the point that, as legend has it, his speakers disintegrated an unfortunate pigeon during an outdoor concert...

EQUIPMENT Piles of Fender stacks and one of the most obnoxious humans alive

WHY SO LOUD? Ted Nugent (Amboy Dukes guitarist): "It was all for me. It was all for how I can get that guitar to respond to the threshold of volume and tone that brought about this exciting siren of sonics! Yeah, that’s exciting. I look at my musical adventure like a hunt. It really is a sonic exploration. Because still to this day when I get onstage I’m looking for uncharted territory. And so the volume and tone thresholds that I continue to beat up are with all due respect are extremely self-serving--but in the final analysis, the customer’s gonna pay you because you’re satisfying your own excellence demand. Fender stacks had such a fuckin’ brittle attack to the sound--it wasn’t like that dirty, distorted Marshall sound. It was just real BRIGHT and real ANNOYING. I was always adding amplifiers, getting this Gibson Byrdland to feedback--outrageous rhinos-mating sounds, big roaring feedback, avalanches. Which is what I made a whole career on! So when the bobbies attempted to pull me off the Concorde back in ‘78 and one of the security men said, ‘Hey! I’ll be damned, it’s Loud Man!’ They all knew who I was. They didn’t arrest me, they asked for my autograph."

HOW LOUD? Nugent: "I was real, REAL fuckin’ loud. Obviously there was an awful lot of drugs goin’ on. And any dynamic would be magnified, at least [chews] the perception of extremes. But [for] sheer decibels outrage, I would challenge anybody to come up with the total hair removal I was capable of in the little convex corner of Hell that I created with my Fender stacks! The pigeon story? _It never happened_. I just knew that if a pigeon flew by [my speakers] I could squawk him if he came by at the right moment! Most of the interviewers were _stoned hippies_--it was so easy to pull their fuckin’ chain. I’d say how when we played Kansas or Iowa, the dairy farmers would draw straws to see who could herd their dairy herd downwind of my amplifiers because butterfat content went up 28% when I performed. I’d say fat girls would come to our show to try to lose weight by getting in front of my fuckin’ dBs!" John Sinclair (MC5): "Ted Nugent? He wasn’t loud then." Wayne Kramer (MC5): "We kicked [the Amboy Dukes’] asses, hundreds of times. They would come up _pale_."

PARDON? Nugent: "My left ear is pretty much whacked. But I can still hear really good in my right ear. Early on, I would stick shell casings, which I always had handy, in my ear, to protect my right ear because that was the one that was facing the amp the most. I got some, [whining, accusatory voice] ‘You’re not a real rock n roller, man! Gotta _protect_ yourself! Can’t you take it?!" And I went, "No. No, I can’t." Ha! I’m having fun, but I’m not an idiot! Plus, I’d never missed a hunting season in my life, and I was concerned about when October came, would I be able to hear the fuckin’ deer?"

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 7.5

6. THE WHO The Who’s maximum R&B performance on May 31, 1976 before 50,000 fans at London’s Charlton Athletic Football Club earned them an entry in the Guinness Book as "World’s Loudest Pop Group" -- the previous titleholder was Deep Purple.

EQUIPMENT 100 amplifiers, 76,000 watts, 120 decibels.

WHY SO DARN LOUD? Pete Townshend (1989): "When [you’re] dealing with a club-size band, it needs to be loud to be rich harmonically. That's how the sound began, how heavy metal began, and was refined by bands like Led Zeppelin and went downhill from there... The Who in concert is...a very zesty, athletic performance. Basically, it stems from the very early days when we had to learn to sell ourselves to the public, otherwise nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice of us."

HOW LOUD? Lemmy (Motorhead): "The Who were really impressive, loud. They were the first ones with Marshalls. Nobody’d seen an amplifier that was bigger than a suitcase before that. And there’s Townshend with this massive fuckin’ thing with ten-inch horns in it." Roger Daltrey: [Regarding being on tour in the ‘70s,] "There was Pete (Townshend), all the way up, only hearing himself. And there was John [Entwhistle] playing four times as loud as he needs to be to hear himself. It was a Catch-22 situation. With the singer in the middle. A complete nightmare."

PARDON? According to Who scholar Andy Neill, Entwhistle is pretty deaf, and tends to rely on lip-reading. He doesn't have tinnitus but still plays bass at his usual "everything on 11" volume. Captain Powerchords has tinnitus, resulting partly from the band's live gigs but mainly the deafening volume in which he and Entwistle used to listen to playbacks over the studio "cans."

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 8.5

5. THE MC5 The revolution, brothers and sisters, will be very, very loud. Or at least that’s what stunned audiences figured in the wake of late-‘60s agitrock n roll performances by the Motor City’s finest star-spangled be-fro’d White Panther Party card-carrying protopunks.

EQUIPMENT four stacks of 100-watt Marshalls and a lot of attitude

WHY SO LOUD?: Wayne Kramer (MC5 guitarist): "It was just a thing of, 'I need _more_.' The teenage fascination with power. This was a chance to make sure that everybody in the area had to listen to ME. It’s all about ME and MY guitar playing. We kicked all the other bands’ asses! We did! We loved it." John Sinclair (MC5 manager/theorist): "The idea was to involve the entire body in a response... If you were to immerse yourself in the sound, it wouldn’t hurt, you know--it would just THRILL you. If you gave yourself up to the music, then the loudness, it would just go right through you. It wouldn’t just go through your ears. But if you stood there and tried to listen to it with your ears, it _would_ hurt. It would be "too loud.... The social milieu. everything was so numb. So you wanted to feel something. And the loudness was part of it. That would make you feel. We were trying to shake people up. The goal was to make them feel something, make ‘em enter a new world. Ha! And drop some acid if possible."

HOW LOUD? Ted Nugent (Amboy Dukes): "As far as street fuck you-ness goes, they definitely had us. There was an energy to the 5 that was nothing short of _mesmerizing_. It was their uninhibitedness and the fact that they focused on the sheer unadulterated middle finger quality of all their music." Tim Bogert (Vanilla Fudge): "I _felt_ them more than saw them. They were _extremely_ loud. I stayed offstage to watch, cuz the pressure levels were better back there!" Kramer: "There was a point where it was TOO much. People really wanted to listen to the band but they had to go stand outdoors!"

PARDON? Kramer: "My hearing’s damaged, and I don’t play that loud today." Sinclair: "I lost some top end standing there in front of the MC5 there for a couple of years every night."

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 9

4. SWANS A typical mid-‘80s club concert by New York industrial-rock pioneers Swans featured massively monolithic rhythms, volume at bowels- loosening levels, and the spectacle of a near-naked vocalist/leader Michael Gira in orgasmic agony singing Raping a Slave. They were soon being touted by show promoters--and the British press-- as ‘the world’s loudest band.‘ Swans’ most infamous performance was a 1985 show in London, at which Gira literally locked the audience inside the venue.

EQUIPMENT When the PA didn’t blow, Swans were rated at 125-140 decibels

WHY SO LOUD? Michael Gira (vocalist/leader): "It wasn’t about being a loud rock band-- I think that’s obviously moronic. It didn’t have any aggressive intent. I just wanted it to be completely overwhelming to myself mostly. Volume, to me, was more about the sustain that’s possible when you have volume, and the transportive quality of it. I wanted to FEEL it. I wanted it to, I guess, destroy my body. [chuckles] It just felt good, so I did it."

HOW LOUD? Gira: "There was one European show in a barn that only held like 400 people. The stage wasn’t wide enough to put the entire PA in front, so we put half of it in the front and half of it at the back, so the audience was smashed between! [cackles] The walls and the ceiling, everything, were actually shaking, raining down the years of collected dust. That was pretty good. Ha ha ha." Jarboe (roadie; later, keyboardist and vocalist): "Every night we had to erect a tent above where my hands would be on the keyboard to keep the paint chips from raining down in between the keys. It was like a war going on from the first second you were on stage. The amplifiers were turned up to 10 and a half. You felt the volume as a _three- dimensional substance_. A lot of times we would blow the entire circuitry of the club, just on the electricity that we were drawing. We would leave town with people running after us, throwing stuff--we kind of made enemies everywhere we went!" Helena Solodor (audiologist): "If you work an 8-hour day [in the presence of constant noise], over 85 decibels is hazardous. You cut it in half for every five decibels you go up. So if you go up to 90 decibels, anything over four hours is detrimental. If you work two hours, anything over 95. One hour, anything over 100. And if you look at a concert that’s probably 110, 120 decibels you could potentially in an hour do some damage."

PARDON? Gira: "I _think_ my hearing’s good." Jarboe: "I finally started wearing earplugs...and I wish I had started a lot earlier."

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 10

3. MOTORHEAD Led by the notorious Lemmy Kilminster, the thrash-punk-metal pioneers have arguably been the world’s most consistently loud live band during the past 25 years, laying waste to audiences via piercing air raid sirens, an overwhelming wall of guitar noise, an onstage B-bomber light rig and, as captured on 1981’s No Sleep Til Hammersmith live album, the world’s loudest roadie. A 1981 headlining performance at an all-day Port Vale Football Grounds metal festival landed Motorhead in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s loudest band; they were later unseated by AC/DC. They’re faster than AC/DC, though.

EQUIPMENT 117,000 watts of onstage power at Port Vale

WHY SO DARN LOUD? Lemmy: "It’s not like we were trying to do anything specific, or be the ‘loudest band in the world.’ We just like it loud, you know? So we certainly got our wish. Ha ha ha. The thing is with being loud, you’ve got to be fairly good or else you don’t come through. It’ll just be a mess. I imagine it’s in the ear of the beholder, of course. One man’s impenetrable mess is another man’s pure music."

HOW LOUD? Wayne Kramer (MC5): "They’re obnoxiously loud. I’ve never heard a note any of ‘em have played--all you get is this _roar_ coming off the stage." Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, Minor Threat): "I was a stagehand for a gig at the Ontario Theater, Washington DC, mid-80's and spent the entire day hauling mostly empty Marshall cabinets on and off the stage. It was a 'heavy metal' show after all--many of the speaker cabinets were actually just decoration. Motorhead had fewer cabinets, but their sound was perfectly clear and absolutely the loudest I had ever heard. I felt like I was practically levitating on the vibrations of the low end. I watched the people writhing in front of the stage, throwing their hands into the air. Was it 'We want more,' or 'Please, no more!'? At one point I had to leave the building because my internal organs felt like they had been readjusted and it was making me want to throw up. I stood outside in the snow surrounded by the speakerless cabinets, took a breath and went back in for more..." Lemmy: "At Port Vale, we built the entire stage out of PA‘s. A guy called up from four miles away while we were soundchecking and said he couldn't hear his TV..."

PARDON? Lemmy: "I think my hearing’s okay, really. The human body adapts remarkably well to a lot of abuse, you know. I’ve never used earplugs. Earplugs are for Ted Nugent. How could you possibly expect the audience to stand something that you yourself will not do?"

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 10

2. MY BLOODY VALENTINE On the heels of their universally acclaimed 1992 _Loveless_ album (a record so good the band has resisted following it up for almost ten years now), Original Scottish Shoegazers My Bloody Valentine gave a series of shows across United States and Europe so loud that they were accused by members of the press as being criminally negligent with regards to the dangerously high volumes they were subjecting their oft-unsuspecting audiences to. On the home stereo, MBV were a dreamy pop band wrapping each successive recording in increasingly dense, deep layers of semi-dissonant gauze. But onstage, MBV were radically loud: Kevin Shields and Blinda Butcher’s sugar harmonies were buried in a coat of sticky razorblades, the noise section in You Made Me Realise could stretch up to 40 minutes, and many fans’ ears were left ringing for over three days.

EQUIPMENT Amps, amps, amps and loads of effects pedals designed by genius Roger Mayer

WHY SO DARN LOUD?: Kevin Shields (1992): "People perceive loud music as somehow being really confrontational and aggressive, but really what you're doing is being sensual.... Volume is important insofar as our sound is this mix of harmonics and rumbles and stuff that you don't get otherwise. The pressure, the physical excitement volume creates, is part of a performance...When it's loud, you can see ripples among the people as they all get hit by certain frequencies...‘You Made Me Realize’ was our favourite part of the gig,...because we would get kind of hypnotised and basically the audience would as well. At the end, when it was over, it felt like something _different_ had happened."

HOW LOUD? Jonathon Poneman (Sub Pop): "They was the loudest I had ever heard a rock band play. I could not discern what was going on. I literally had to walk out of the venue for a couple minutes to [recover]..because it was such a sonic blast. A squall." Alan McGee (ex-Creation Records chief; signed MBV; currently manages Primal Scream): "The Primals are louder these days with Shields in them than MBV ever were."

PARDON? Both Butcher and Shields are reported to suffer from tinnitus. Butcher (bassist/singer): "I had a punctured ear drum which fortunately they were able to put right but for a while I couldn't hear out of one ear and it was very depressing. On stage we all wear hearing protection and encourage anyone who sees us regularly to do the same." Shields (guitarist/singer): "I did the damage to my ears listening to mixes in headphones at very loud levels without giving my ears time to recover."

MOJO LOUDOMETER RATING: 10.5

1. BLUE CHEER Named after a particularly bracing brand of locally manufactured LSD, this late-’60s/early ’70s San Francisco superpower trio of acid- prince Neanderthals played none-harder rock in clubs and auditoriums. Gut, their ex-Hells Angel manager, famously claimed that the Cheer were so loud live that ‘they turn the air into cottage cheese," and variety host Steve Allen introduced Blue Cheer to his 1968 national TV audience with the words, "Here’s Blue Cheer. Run for your lives!"

EQUIPMENT Six stacks of 100-watt Marshalls

WHY SO DARN LOUD? Leigh Stephens (Guitarist): "It was just that we wanted to feel that sound, however it evolved to almost cartoon proportions. We just wanted to feel the overwhelming pushing of air. If the speakers blew your hair around, it was loud enough. Hey, we were kids, we thought that was cool."

HOW LOUD? Stephens: "We were louder than anyone we ever played with--not that that is necessarily a good thing." Ted Nugent (Amboy Dukes): "We were way louder than they were. Absolutely. Not even fuckin’ close. They had those Marshalls, and Marshalls were not really abrasive. They were a bigger, grungier sound, but they were not as sheer decibel-creating as my Fender Stax." Lemmy (Motorhead): "I saw them at the Roundhouse in London. 1967 or ‘68. They were terrible, but they were really loud fuckin’ loud alright, yeah." Wayne Kramer (MC5): "It was..._too_ loud. It droned at a level that was like a 747 in your face." Leigh Stephens: "Usually [audience members] would be leaning forward in anticipation, then after the first note they looked like an astronaut subjected to +g-force." Linda Ploeg (audience member): "It totally through your equilibrium off--I felt like I was falling. It was a totally physical experience, not just an audio experience." Kadyn Williams (audiologist): "You can feel dizzy or nauseated from loud sounds--tt’s the Tulio Syndrome--because everything is so close together anatomically: the inner ear and the balance organ intertwine together going to the brain."

PARDON? Bassist/vocalist Dickie Petersen has some hearing damage. Stephens says, "Luckily my hearing is intact, and nowadays I only use one Fender Hot Rod Deville."

Anyway, how much are they/where should I go (ear doctor?), etc.?

I left my earplugs home once and had to leave the gig I was at - I turned to my friend and said (well, shouted): "It's like there's a little demon in my head, crumpling paper every time there's a distorted guitar or a snare hit". Absolutely unbearable.

I have yet to check out the custom earplugs. I just buy multi-packs of the minus 29 dB drugstore jobbies, and I've gone through a LOT of them over the years.

Etymotic makes the best musicians' earplugs. Expect to pay around $200 total.

I've used these in the past, but have sworn off ANY and ALL loud music at all costs by this point. Too many years of stupidly playing loud music, recording loud music, and listening to loud music left me with barely any hearing above 15 kHz and years of tinnitus (thankfully cured by acupuncture; BTW, if you have tinnitus, ingesting aspirin will make it twice as worse). All this achieved by age 31.

Seriously, protect your hearing. You really don't want to endure the sort of damage I inflicted on myself. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Are the basic $12 Etymotic ER-20 plugs better than foam cheapies?

Definitely.

Has anyone tried these newfangled earplugs that are meant for casual wear in noisy environments (Loop, Flare, Vibes, etc.)? My noise sensitivity is getting worse, to the point that I avoid or leave loud bars, restaurants, etc. I've read about these earplugs that are said to allow for clear conversation while reducing background noise, but I'm hesitant to pull the trigger (due in part to the cost); not sure if buying a pair is really "better" than just carrying the cheap foam kind to stick in my ears when needed. I'm also a little hesitant to get into wearing something like that on a regular basis, for a few reasons – including the sense that I'd be "giving into" a problem that's largely psychological.

Thanks, I know this isn't really music-related (although sometimes the "problem" involves loud background music).

I have a pair of the Loop earplugs.I would recommend them as a budget option (I think I paid around $30), they do a good job of blocking out extraneous crowd noise and you can still hear conversations and music. They are definitely better than the disposable foam earplugs. I eventually sprung for custom molded earplugs which I wear to live music events/clubs, but that is definitely an investment (they cost around $200).

I have tinnitus and I’ve always found the alpine music safe pro plugs really good

Agree the trick is to use them when it’s really loud (e.g. at the movies) and persevere without ear plugs at other times. My sensitivity to noise actually got much more manageable when I stopped wearing earplugs so often.

Thx for the tips/leads!

NB you’re not “giving into” anything wearing earplugs when it’s dangerously loud! And there’s nothing we can do about the fact that our ability to hear conversation against background noise deteriorates as we get older - earplugs can be very helpful for that reason too. The trick is not to become overeliant on them and, as long it’s safe, keep your ears accommodated to manageable loud noise (e.g. rush hour trains, busy cafes, etc). If you wear earplugs TOO much then perversely it makes you even more sensitive to loud noise.

I hear you! Yeah, I’m just wary of indulging the aspects of this noise-phobia that I recognize as truly irrational/overboard… I will save the plugs for situations where the decibel level on the watch app actually goes into the yellow (which can be both a blessing and curse to have as a handy reference point).