So, I got a fairly nice pair of chat headphones for my 360... and yeah, I may be partially deaf. I seriously cannot hear shit, I put those on, suddenly I can understand the voices in videos and dialog on my 360 games is balanced. If I pipe a DVD over my speakers I still can't hear shit. Had to try and watch something on my PC, with 350 USD Logitech fancy speakers, can't hear shit. I finally shoved it into a cheap pair of Microsoft 20 USD headphones that I only use for MMO chatting and suddenly I can hear it.

Are all my speaker systems seriously that unbalanced? I find that hard to believe, I don't even have a bass on my TV's system.

Seriously, without headphones on I have to turn the volume so high on movies and video games that my neighbors get pissed. If I can I put dialog at 10 and game sound/music on 3 or 4, it is that friggin bad.

Okay, now I'm just complaining. I guess my curiosity is if this is just a "getting older" thing or what? Doctors that look in my ears tend to be surprised about the scarring on my ear drums, guess I had a lot of ear infections as a kid, but I don't remember them. Maybe that's it.

I guess I really will be spending a metric bucket load of cash on headphones for my computer too... sucks it's hard to talk to anyone else with headphones on, but I guess it's hard to talk to anyone with the speaker system turned up to "11" anyway...

I find myself a bit irritated about this... Pat me on the head and tell me it's normal or something, okay GOGers?:)

I've some "fancy" hifi stereos that a lot of people have praised (I only know a few people so a few is a lot), and I can't understand Yahtzee's speech in Zero Punctuation if I don't turn the volume up to "the theme song makes your head explode" levels. Then, put on even cheap headphones, and I can understand it even on what I consider normal volumes.
So I'm guessing it's normal or something.

Subtitles are your friends :D

Some games are like movies. You can't hear nothing if some music and especially sound effects boom at the same time without headphones.

I concur.. about those subtitles.

For best results you generally want to set games up so that voices seem the loudest, followed by effects, and finally music. The difference between sliders may have to be very large to achieve this. For some games I end up putting the music very low to keep it in the background where it belongs.

Reducing the bass/treble may make your TV/speakers sound clear at a higher overall volume. If a graphic equaliser is available you can also try changing things there to make different ranges more/less pronounced. As for music and videos, third-party programs such as Media Player Classic-Home Cinema allow you to set special output modes such as "normalize", which is less faithful but makes some sounds stand out more.

If after all that you can still only hear clearly with headphones then you'd want to look at getting headphones that are really comfy so you can use them for long durations.

I used to use speakers alot but then I got into headphones at some point.....don't recall why. I DO know, though, that I love the better immersion(imo) one gets from wearing headphone vs using speakers.(Along with other pluses such as: The way a good set of headphones can block background[IRL] noise, having less clutter around my desk area, etc.

IMO the better hearing with headphone that you're experiencing comes from the fact that good headphones block that background noise. (That background noise can actually make it harder to hear your PC/console/etc sounds than you might think.....try playing a game with various devices running that have fans/etc nearby, and then shut those devices completely off and keep playing and notice the difference.)

Hell, I thought it was just me. Bloody movies - especialy Blu-ray - I turn up to 40 or more on our TV (I'm not sure how high the volume goes, actually, but I've had some moives at 50). Of course, the loud stuff is LOUD but the convo and quieter stuff is so bloody low that I have to turn it up or I can out only make it out as mumbling.

This reminds me of the time I first played Sin Episodes: Emergence......damn game subtitled everything BUT the phone messages(The ones you get by using the phones in the game with the phone numbers you find/see as you play.), and whenever you play the game's background noise will nearly drown out the messages as they play in most instances.

I have tinnitus from guitar amps cos I was stupid when I was younger, I thought ear plugs were for sissy's, but apparently they are for people that would like to actually hear stuff without everything having to go up to 11.

Anyway, I think your issue may be with certain frequencies as opposed to actual volume.

It depends. If you use 5.1 speakers, be sure that you changed your audio codecs settings.

Usually , it requires around 10 dB boost on middle speaker / channel. Conversations are mainly processed by center speaker.

I don't know why the conversations are so quiet in movies, but they are. And that's the only way to repair that.

Music and effects are loud as fuck, so simply boosting your volume wouldn't help.

Also, if you use AC3 codecs , be sure to turn off "normalize matrix" setting.
It's very similar with video games in 5.1 - middle channel is usually the quietest.

I've found that the audio compression used in Dolby Digital tracks on DVDs is horrible anyway. If you are watching some kind of popcorn film with loud action scenes, the dialogue normalisation on DVDs is horrible and I've always found that I've had to keep turning sound up and down. I've used the trick that keeveek mentioned - boosting the centre speaker - to get around the DD normalisation problems.

Dolby TrueHD is marginally better, but DTS on DVDs or DTS HD on Blurays is the way to go for better sound normalisation. When it comes to DVD though, English-language DTS tracks are a rarity here (only the German is in DTS).

Steven Seagal movies are the worst for having to turn the volume up and down all the time. His mumbling is so quiet compared to all the guns and explosions.

Do you turn up the volume as a habit, or can you ease it down and your hearing will adapt somewhat?

I used to be the piss-off-the-neighbors type too, watching TV with the volume knob turned to 11 and then ripped out.

Turns out though, after I tried keeping the volume down for an extended period of time (on both TV and through headphones), I was totally fine with watching TV or playing games at about 60% of the volume I was previously using.

So, I've been raping my ears for 10 years for no reason. I do the exact opposite. Unless the music sucks. The reason is I don't want to blow my eardrums through my skull with the ZOMG SFX OVERLOAD most games are throwing these days. Ever try to play Diablo 3 with max sound channels and effects volume at max?

Ouch.

Solid advice. Hearing loss in young people is unfortunately way too common. Bad hearing practices is a big problem, but there are other sources such as iPod's ill fitting ear buds that cause a lot of it as well.

Getting a proper examination should help a bit with making informed decisions.

It's amazing how folks like my Dad could go through a tour in Vietnam then work around noisy machinery without hearing protection for the next several decades and only have minor hearing loss; then the folks who seemingly do much less and have major loss before they're middle aged.

This. I commute to work by train, and quite often I'll notice some young person (25 or under) whose music I can clearly hear even though they are using ear buds, and I'm listening to music myself with a pair of full-cup headphones with active noise cancellation. Whenever I encounter one of these, I can't help but have two consecutive thoughts:

1. How the hell can they stand it?
2. I bet they're going to have hearing problems later in life.

By the way, I highly recommend using headphones with active noise cancellation. It means you don't have to turn up the volume nearly as much to drown out all the noise common to public transportation. You'll get better sound quality (because of less distortion) and spare your ears.