why would anyone use a noise weighting curve to assess hearing damage that would indeed be stupid as there is no reason at all to suppose that there is any correlation between apparent loudness and damage i stick to my argument that is the only curve actually designed for noise assessment for reasons given and that a weighting is very wrong for the job it doesn't even have a proper hf rolloff anything like that of the equal loudness contours assessing music is something yet again and since it is sometimes noise like and sometimes pure tones it really needs something more complex than a weighting curve based on proper combination of the outputs of a bank of narrow band filter