AndreusMaximus
Master
So recently I talked over the phone to a friend of mine who had just got his first suppressor. He told me he tried it out on his 300 blackout AR-15 with subsonic ammo, and was disappointed in how loud it still was. I tried to ask him to describe to me how loud it was in relation to other sounds (like compared to an unsuppressed 22lr, for instance) but he couldn't really seem to give an accurate picture. I've been toying around in my head with the idea of maybe eventually getting a suppressor one day, and had always thought that if I did so, I would probably be primarily intending to use it on a 300 blackout AR-15. I never really bought into the whole 300 BO fanboy line about "Oh, it's like movie quiet, the only thing you hear is the action cycling, you can't even hear the shot, blah blah blah..." but at the same time I had always thought the idea was that subsonic 300 Blackout would be far quieter that 5.56 NATO (assuming both are suppressed) because it doesn't create a sonic boom. However, this conversation got me curious to try to researching the numbers, and I was extremely surprised by what I found.
First off, I was surprised just how hard it is to find hard data (though I guess this shouldn't be surprising, since there's so many different way to measure the sound, depending on how far away your meter is, what direction it is relative to the gun, what ammo you're using, etc.) Most numbers I could find, though, seemed to fall within a certain general range, and those numbers looked extremely surprising to me. Supposedly, it looks like 130 decibels is a pretty good point to get to with suppressed 300 BO, but what surprised me more was that I saw some sources claiming that suppressed 5.56 would typically only be about 132 decibels at the shooter's ear. If that's the case, then why does everyone always seem to talk as if subsonic ammo is so much quieter that supersonic ammo when it's suppressed?
So are the numbers I'm looking at way off? Can anybody who has ever shot 5.56 and 300 blackout suppressed give me a general idea of how loud the actually are compared to each other? Or compared to other guns?
Thanks!
First off, I was surprised just how hard it is to find hard data (though I guess this shouldn't be surprising, since there's so many different way to measure the sound, depending on how far away your meter is, what direction it is relative to the gun, what ammo you're using, etc.) Most numbers I could find, though, seemed to fall within a certain general range, and those numbers looked extremely surprising to me. Supposedly, it looks like 130 decibels is a pretty good point to get to with suppressed 300 BO, but what surprised me more was that I saw some sources claiming that suppressed 5.56 would typically only be about 132 decibels at the shooter's ear. If that's the case, then why does everyone always seem to talk as if subsonic ammo is so much quieter that supersonic ammo when it's suppressed?
So are the numbers I'm looking at way off? Can anybody who has ever shot 5.56 and 300 blackout suppressed give me a general idea of how loud the actually are compared to each other? Or compared to other guns?
Thanks!
