![]() ![]() These are the most commonly used on the range due to their low cost and ready availability. The first would be good old fashioned earplugs. Primarily, there are three different types of hearing protection options. The scary part, however, is what those decibels do to your hearing. Shotguns show a similar range with the Mossberg bolt registering at 150 dB and the Remington 11-87 turkey hitting 161.5 dB.Īs you can see, it doesn’t matter which gun you choose, you are exposing your ears to some serious decibels. 22LR hits 154 dB while the Smith & Wesson 586 hits 169 dB. With regards to pistols, the Ruger Bearcat. Meanwhile, the Winchester Model 70 reaches 166.5 decibels to top the scale. On the low end of the scale with regards to rifles, the Remington 514 registers in at 139.6 decibels. The full list can be reviewed here, but we’ll examine the range of that scale. The Council of Accreditation in Occupational Hearing Conservation did a little testing and came up with a full scale for various firearms. ![]() Remarkably, gunfire registers at a higher decibel level than a jet engine.Ī jet engine registers at 140 dB while a 9mm pistol registers in at 160 dB. ![]() To put it into perspective, a jet engine is about 1,000,000,000,000 times more powerful than near silence. A sound 10 times more powerful registers at a 10 dB and a sound 100 times more than near silence is 20 dB.Ī sound 1,000 times more powerful would be 30 dB. The smallest audible sound, which is near total silence, registers at 0 dB on the decibel scale. The human ear is a marvelous feature of creation and it can detect the smallest of sounds. So let’s talk decibel levels and gunfire.Ī decibel is the unit used to measure the intensity of any sound. ![]() This doesn’t create a great deal of noise, but when you add all three up you’ve got a decibel level that’s not so easy on the ears. Think of it as a smaller version of a jet breaking the sound barrier.įinally, you’ve got the mechanical sounds of the gun in action. This is the cracking sound you hear as the bullet flies through the air. The result is something called a sonic boom. That is to say that they travel faster than the speed of sound. Whereas muzzle velocity varies based on the ammunition and firearm, nearly all bullets travel at supersonic speeds. However, to say that a bullet travels at a very fast rate is a little vague. This is a shockwave created by high-pressure gases escaping and expanding when a gun is fired. The end result of that speed and pressure is what is known as the muzzle blast. When a bullet exits the muzzle, it is doing so at a very fast rate and with a great deal of pressure built up behind it. There are three different ways that guns produce noise. With every firearm, the science remains the same. However, in order to take action to protect one’s hearing, one must first understand why guns make so much noise. That means that the energy in the sound has to double, before someone can notice any difference.Īfter this technical jargon, here is a table of loudness.Guns are loud and there is little debate about that fact. Also, it is interesting to note that most people cann ot discern any difference in perceived loudness of less than 3 db. So a 60 db sound sounds twice as loud as a 50 db one, although there is 10 times more energy in it. Although loudness is subjective, most people perceive one sound to be twice as loud as another, when there is a 10-fold increase in energy, or a difference of about 10 db. 45 ACP cartridge which is measured at 157 db.Īnother complication is that the human ear does not hear linearly either. For example, if you look at the table below, the 9mm Para cartridge at 160 db has twice the sound energy of the. In logarithmic scales a sound which is only 3 db higher than another, has twice the energy. 2x50 mph is double the velocity of the second car. In a linear scale, like velocity, if someone's car is moving at 100 mph, we know that he is moving at twice the speed of someone else who is doing 50 mph, i.e. One difference between the decibel scale and most of the other units we usually use in our everyday life, is the fact that the decibel scale is not linear, but logarithmic. Like most other units, the bottom of the scale or 0 db, is an arbitrary setting, which by convention is set to be the level of the sound that we can bearly hear, or our hearing threshold, as it is normally known. Sound is measured in decibels (db), much like temperature is measured in degrees and speed in miles (or kilometers) per hour. So you want to know which cartridge makes the louder bang? ![]()
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