No my ears were not ringing and I wasn't wearing ear plugs.
I worked most of my career on large scale high power RF and microwave amplifiers, stuff the size of semi trucks, with tens or hundreds of kilowatts of cooling fans and heat pumps. Some of these amplifiers ran down into single-digit kilohertz territory, and the ferrite cores would just scream, like a billion dog whistles or dying lightbulbs.
My first day in the lab as a young engineer, I remember it driving me up the wall, like a dentists drill going on a tooth for hours on end. At one point I walked from my desk on the far end of this gymnasium-sized lab, over to where one of the old-timers had his head literally inside of an amplifier chassis, with all the ferrites just screaming bloody murder. I asked him how he could stand being that close to that noise, and he said, "what noise?"
When I described it to him, he said something like, "oh yeah, any of us who've been working one this stuff for any amount of time lose our hearing at those frequencies." It was true, there wasn't anyone over 50 in that building who could hear those amps, while they drove the young guys absolutely batty.
Point is, if your ears aren't ringing after a full day of on and off saw usage, it's probably a sign your hearing is already shot, more than anything else. It's okay, hearing loss, or at least some plausible claim to it, can be very handy for any married person.
