At great looking infographic that provides interesting facts about silencers - Devices that suppress the blast created when a gun is discharged.
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So a silenced 9mm is slightly louder than THUNDER?
I won’t say they are wrong, but that sure doesn’t feel right.
Silencers are very badly named honestly. A “silenced” gun is still very loud, it’s just moderately quieter than an unsilenced one. People watch movies and TV shows and play videogames that make it seem like a silenced gun barely makes any noise at all and think that’s reality. That is very much not reality, it just makes for a more entertaining story.
Are you telling me a silenced gun doesn’t make a sneaky zipping sound? It can’t be true.
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Subsonic rounds though! I’ve seen videos of subsonic 9mm and .22LR where all you heard was the action cycling.
I don’t have a suppressor, but I got some subsonic .22LR to play with. Couldn’t tell any difference.
I could be full of it… but I think that’s because those rounds are intended to travel below the sonic boom threshold resulting in less noise when using a suppressor.
A unsilenced 9mm out of a handgun is normally around 160db (assuming common ammunition and a common type of handgun). A reduction to 125db with a silencer seems about right.
Edit: Here’s a silencer talk link that goes very in detail. For their chart, 125 db is actually very close to the low end, with many suppressed shots being louder.
https://www.silencertalk.com/results.htm
FWIW I believe those measurements are right at the silencer while the thunder measurement I find is “within a few hundred feet”. There can be quite a significant drop in perceived noise from silenced guns with a moderate amount of distance making them sound like a distinct but not overly loud“thwack”.
A reduction of 35dB is more than eight times as quiet, and 3162 times less energetic.
A few decibels can make an immense difference because decibels follow a logrtihmic scale, and this is especially true at the noise levels of a gun. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly small reduction of even 20dB on an original measurement of 160dB; you’re reducing the amount of sound my much, much more than the ⅛ that you might expect!
Absolutely. To add perspective, typical firearm hearing protection reduces sound by 25-35dB.
I’m sure the full story is more complicated when taking into account frequencies, duration of the spike in sound, etc.
I always try to go with “suppressed” rather than “silenced”.
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The only major thing this infographic leaves out is the differences in subsonic vs supersonic ammo.
If you’re firing supersonic ammo you’re going to get the ‘crack’ of the round breaking the sound barrier no matter what, and it’s always going to be somewhere in the vicinity of loud as fuck.
If you fire subsonic ammo it’s not going to be incredibly quieter… until you combine that with a suppressor, at which point the loudest part of the firearm can actually be the cycling of the action- the US actually requested a .45 suppressed pistol for SOCOM that could have the slide ‘locked’ which basically made it a single shot that was basically silent. iirc that got scrapped because the gun having to sit there static and absorb the force absolutely mangled it over time.
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