Occupational noise standards accept measurable hearing loss and do not protect critical listening

Evidence

It is essential to know that in existing national and international standards the only criterion being considered is the preservation of the ability to understand speech. The OSHA, NIOSH and similar occupational noise exposure criteria were created for manufacturing and other industrial workers and the goal was not to prevent hearing loss, it was to preserve enough that at the end of a working life, conversational speech at 1 m distance was possible. Permanent damage of an important kind is inevitable. Hi-fi hearing, critical listening ability is not preserved. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1889

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on silence and noise exposure — the One Square Inch of Silence material on noise as danger signal shows how sub-clinical damage accumulates the same way.
• SEED: Angle: the gap between legal hearing ‘protection’ standards designed for factory survival and what audio professionals actually need to preserve is a structural blind spot worth an essay.