Unpopular Opinion

We’re way beyond that. Overly loud bands are so 1980s. Overly loud rock bands are why I became a Blues fan.

However these days I’m more concerned about sporting events. In the last year I’ve been to multiple hockey games where the volume is painful and my watch frequently records over 100bB. The new Islanders arena was absolute worst, with every announcement or music over 90 dB and peaking at 115dB. Do you know what would energize me more than covering my ears in pain? Being able to hear the crowd, participate in cheers or chants

Quiet concerts will probably be a thing if a big artist fronts it. Could be a cool concept

I'm taking live sound classes at my community college right now and we talked about this yesterday. The biggest issue with a large venue packed with people is the noise floor is very high. For instance if the crowd is 90db, then you've only got 10-20db of headroom to work with. 90db is already enough to cause hearing damage after 8 hours, and it gets exponentially worse with just a few db more, by 100 you can only safely be in that for 2 hours and that is generally the ideal loudness for that kind of venue. Of course since the engineers probably have hearing loss, they tend to raise it even higher to 110 which is loud enough to still cause damage over time even with regular earbuds unfortunately. So unless you can have a quiet crowd there is nothing you can do about needing ear protection, I recommend hanging by the engineer booth because they tend to be just far enough away to comfortably hear everything around 90db because they generally can't use earbuds while actively mixing.

On the alternate I've been to concerts where you just couldn't hear the band playing unless you pressed into everyone at the front. Was a terrible experience and felt like I wasted my money. I'm a big fan of putting in ear plugs, eating an edible and then riding out the vibrations. I agree there must be a good middle ground but I would rather it too loud with ear pro than too quiet.

Went to a local rock concert once. Had to go into the middle of the crowd to fetch a friend and alert him of something that had happened. The music was unbearably loud for me. Noticed that virtually everyone was wearing ear plugs.

Found it absurd. Why not lower the volume instead and have people forego the plugs? Less noise pollution in the local area too. After the concert was over I asked some participants about it. Everyone claimed they liked the loudness or that it was necessary somehow. My impression: they liked to keep up with the appearances of being hardcore, it being for tough folks. But they didn't want the actual hearing damage.