At great looking infographic that provides interesting facts about silencers - Devices that suppress the blast created when a gun is discharged.
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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So a silenced 9mm is slightly louder than THUNDER?
I won’t say they are wrong, but that sure doesn’t feel right.
I always try to go with “suppressed” rather than “silenced”.
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. A reduction to 125db with a small silencer seems about right.
That graphic is very simple. It doesn’t include important variables like the ammunition type, and the design features or the volume of the silencer.
A specifically selected subsonic 9mm round going through a larger volume or especially integral suppressor in a barrel longer than a normal pistol (think MP5SD) is going to be a lot quieter.
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.
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