Most people do not like loud noise. Some people have particularly sensitive ears, they cannot bear ordinary levels of noise.
Hyper sensitive hearing is most commonly associated with hearing loss.Have you noticed how some older people ask you to speak up a bit. After a while they may ask you to stop shouting or they may say "I'm not deaf".
Loudness discomfort is typically a problem for people that suffer from a sensorinueral hearing loss (A sensorineural hearing loss is caused by damage or a disorder of the inner ear, or of the auditory nerve, nerve fibres going from the inner ear to the brain stem).
However this is not a problem who suffer from a conductive hearing loss(A conductive hearing loss involves the breakdown or obstruction of some part of the external or middle ear which transmits or conducts the physical vibrations of sound through air, bone or tissue.)
As we age, the number of hair cells and nerve fibres that are responsible for picking up in the inner ear is reduced.The ability to grade different intensities of sound is reduced. How do we compensate for this?
Our brain will "switch on " all remaining nerve fibres to produce almost maximum loudness. As a result, even quite moderate sounds may seem to be unbearably loud.
The dynamic range is narrowed or reduced in the ears: If sounds are heard at all, they are heard as loud noises.
When a person suffers from hearing loss and needs to use hearing instruments, the hearing instruments should not overload the ear with amplified sound. To overcome this, many hearing instruments have "peak clipping". Another more sophisticated form of compression is known as automatic volume control.
Some recent research has shown that in some cases the use of white noise applied to the ear by a white noise generator masker can help.
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