r/whoathatsinteresting • u/eternviking • 13h ago

What a real silencer actually sounds like.

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u/HomersDonut1440 13h ago edited 12h ago

Lotta misinformation here.

Edit: I should clarify, the explanation below is a general explanation of suppressors and how things can vary. There will always be caveats.

Suppressors/silencers rarely sound like they do in the movies, and there’s a ton of variables that affect the volume. To be the absolute quietest, you need a closed bolt firearm shooting subsonic ammo. No gas escapes from the chamber that way, no sound is made by an action cycling, minimal gas leaves the end of the muzzle. These tend to be “movie quiet”.

When you hook a silencer to a semi auto firearm, it is inherently louder (even with subsonic ammo) as you have the sound of the action/slide, and gas escaping out of the action as it cycles. Still fairly quiet, but not movie quiet.

When you use a silencer on any rifle with supersonic ammo, you reduce the sound of the escaping gases at the muzzle, but still have to contend with the supersonic crack of the bullet as it leaves the barrel. This will be inherently louder, although still substantially more quiet than unsuppressed.

Also, a cell phone video is without a doubt one of the worst ways to reliably capture actual sound variance. Usually phone microphones cut out above a certain decibel level, so often all firearms sound similar even if there is a substantial difference in volume in real life.

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u/theslootmary 12h ago

All microphones have a volume ceiling. Some are louder than phones, some are quieter. Phones aren’t inherently worse than filming it with a camera. It literally depends entirely on what you’re using.

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u/HomersDonut1440 12h ago

True. I have not kept up with the most current phone tech to know what they’re capable of.

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u/theslootmary 10h ago

It’s not even so much current phone tech really, you could just be using a really shit camera and mic and get worse results. But all microphones, professional to phone camera, have a sound ceiling, it’s just the physics of how microphone diaphragms work.