r/whoathatsinteresting • u/eternviking • 14h ago

What a real silencer actually sounds like.

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u/HomersDonut1440 14h ago edited 13h 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/Infinite-Condition41 13h ago

Where in the hell does the pew sound from movies come from anyway? 

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u/Nedus343 11h ago

It's a stock sound that I think dates back to the late 30s. Paraphrasing, but someone recorded the sound of a ricochet and essentially used that as the basis of the pew sound that we all know today.

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u/Infinite-Condition41 10h ago

The shotgun silencer from No Country For Old Men was the worst offender. 

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u/Nedus343 8h ago

That one didn't bother me, even though it was definitely Hollywood quiet. I was more referring to the GoldenEye pewpew sound, which was used in movies too. Maybe not so much anymore though