Too much sex or too much bass?
April 16, 2009 by Ian
On the H & S front, I have it on good authority that too much bass can damage…your….eyesight.
Apparently, frequencies over 150 hz WILL damage your hearing but frequencies in the bass or sub-bass region (5-40hz ) WILL damage your eyesight !
Bass, as I am sure you all know, is about moving large volumes of air in time with the speaker cones on a push-pull basis. So, out of doors at, say, Glastonbury, the bass cabs move huge amounts of air which is all ok as long as you do not stand within 10-20 metres of the speakers. You cannot hear the damaging frequencies, only feel your chest cavity going in and out in time to the beat. The same thing happens to your eyeballs if you get too close, the retinas rupture and become detached from your eyeballs, causing you to go blind.
Imagine using the same amount of power at a disco indoors with the dancers/audience very much closer to the speakers. It does not bear thinking about, does it ? Luckily most DJ’s do not use such huge amounts of bass power at their gigs, do we !
A practical test that can demo what I mean can be done in any kitchen or boiler room where there is gas boiler. All you need to do is stand very close to the permanent ventilator/air brick and wait for the boiler to fire-up. Its just like a piston in a hydraulic system.
My source tells me that they recently were able to demo this, quite by accident when testing high powered amps in a relatively small test building. The bass blew out the letterbox and, on further investigation, they were able to see the window frames bowing in-and-out in time to the beat.
Food for thought We might all end up as ‘pinball wizards’…….!
Cheers
Ian Barber
