Silencer Saturday #344: Thunderbeast Arms Silencer Summit 2024

by Daniel Y

Published: August 31st, 2024

silencer saturday 344 thunderbeast arms silencer summit 2024

Thunderbeast Arms recently hosted the 2024 Silencer Summit where suppressor manufacturers around the industry met to test their wares. The event gathered data from many of the silencers on the market at the same place and on the same equipment for apples-to-apples comparison. The full results of that test are now published, and they are pretty interesting.

Silencer Saturday @ TFB:

Test Setup

Many manufacturers publish decibel reduction numbers in their promotional materials. Factors like the quality of testing equipment,varied host guns, and the placement of microphones are not always consistent, which can make direct comparisons difficult. The whole idea of the Silencer Summit is testing as many silencers as possible under the same conditions. The same test guns are used with the same measurement equipment for each category of test.

One part of the test setup that initially raised my eyebrows was that the test firing was conducted indoors. You don’t need to be a sound engineer to know that echoes exist and could impact the measurements. However, sound reflections off of the walls only become an issue 0.075 seconds after the shot. This allows more than enough time to capture the peak sound level, which is right around 0.05 seconds from firing. The speed of sound is relatively constant, and that speed combined with exact distance measurements from the microphones to the ground and walls show definitively that those are the surfaces creating the reflections.

Another reflection that is a factor in some testing is the shooter’s head. This is not the first Silencer Summit. Thunderbeast hosted the inaugural event in 2023, and the results are posted here. The 2023 test used a shooter to pull the trigger, which meant that data included sound reflections from that shooter. The 2024 setup used an improved fixture to support the gun during firing without a shooter holding it.

Diagram of the test setup. (Thunderbeast image)

Picture of the test fixture. The shooter’s ear microphone is sitting on the black tripod. (Thunderbeast image)

2024 Results

This year’s summit tested 365 gun and silencer combinations over five days. The data is broken up into various tables based on the host guns used, with rows for each suppressor (and a bare muzzle as a control). The various columns show the measurements for each test. There are numerous columns for each test, but a few that stand out to me:

Mil dBA AVG - The average of the peak decibel measurements from the left and right microphones.
MR LEQ dBA - An average sound pressure over a specific 10-milisecond window of the shot process on the right side of the muzzle (typically the ejection port side)
SE dBA - Peak impulse at the shooter’s ear
SE LEQ dBA - An average sound pressure over a specific 10-millisecond window of the shot process at the shooter’s ear

The lists can be sorted by each of the columns to see the best (and worst) results in each test category. I’ll refer to Mil dBA AVG as the muzzle average and SE dBA as the shooter’s ear average.

.223 Suppressors / 16” AR-15 (5.56)

The winner at the muzzle end is the Banish 223, at 132.8. At the shooter’s ear, the Radical Defense LS5TI won out at 137.01.

.30 Suppressor / 16” AR-15 (5.56)

There was a two-way tie for the best muzzle average between the Liberty Precision Anthem-L2 and SilencerCo Omega 300. Both scored 133.5. The Omega 300 had an edge in the shooter’s ear measurement at 140.73, while the Anthem-L2 scored 141.65.

The PTR VSM1 gets an honorable mention as well, with a muzzle score of 133.6. That is extremely close, and the human ear can generally only discern a full decibel change. For all practical purposes this is a tie with the other two suppressors.

.30 Suppressor / 20” .308

The top muzzle scores in this category were the Dead Air Nomad L Ti (132.6) and Otter Creek Hydrogen L (132.7). But there were several others all within a tenth of one another:

Thunderbeast Magnus RR .30 CB (132.8)

ECCO Accipiter 9in (132.9)

Thunderbeast Magnus .30 CB (133.0)

Dilligent Defense Enticer LTI (133.0)

Again, the human ear would probably not be able to tell a difference between these decibel ratings at the muzzle. The Hydrogen-L is the winner at the shooter’s ear though, at only 123.68.

9mm Suppressor / 9mm Pistol

The PTR VENT 2 scored the lowest muzzle average, at only 120.1. It was also the second-quietest shooter’s ear rating at 128.04. PTR may be a new suppressor manufacturer, but it seems that the porous construction of this silencer is very effective.

B&T’s 9mm RBS had the lowest shooter’s ear rating at 126.46, and was third quietest in the muzzle average at 124.2.

Conclusion

Just looking at the lowest decibel number in each category is not a holistic way to absorb all of the data. If you are shopping for any of the silencers on this list, make sure you take all of the various measurements into account. This is a lot of data, and the team at Thunderbeast deserve some thanks, as well as all of the manufacturers who participated. Be sure to head over to the full report to parse the data in more detail.

#ThunderBeast #SilencerSaturday #SilencerSummit

Daniel Y

AKA @fromtheguncounter on Instagram. Gun nerd, reloader, attorney, and mediocre hunter. Daniel can still be found on occasion behind the counter at a local gun store. When he is not shooting, he enjoys hiking, camping, and rappelling around Utah.

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4 comments

Aono on Aug 31, 2024

It’s absolutely nuts to me that they still pour all this effort into churning out tons of peak dB data, which is as meaningless as OSHA’s 140db standard to assessing the actual loudness/hearing damage risk of any of these cans. I feel really bad for all the new silencer buyers out there, that come across something like this and think that it is remotely relevant.

Assessing the meaningful loudness of a silencer by its peak dB alone is like deciding, sight unseen, which mountain must be harder to climb based SOLELY on the elevation of its summit, and not the terrain, angle of the slops, or any other factors. It simply doesn’t make any sense at all. But these companies (especially TBAC, still upset with PEW Science for revealing that their Ultra 9 wasn’t actually the quietest can in existence) must think it’s useful for marketing purposes, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.

It’s a self licking ice cream cone for TBAC and the rest of these companies. They design their cans to post low peak db, and then they get exactly what they designed for. But does that make it a safer can? Of course not, just like it’s not automatically less work to scale a 20 foot sheer cliff vs a gently sloping 30 foot hillside. If you had to climb either of these every day, which one would you prefer? But the 20 foot sheer cliff option is what they’re tying to sell you with a straight face. It’s mind boggling unless you realize this whole thing is purely a sales effort and not an actual attempt to protect people’s safety.

2 Reply
- See 2 previous
- Maximilian Müller on Aug 31, 2024
  
  It's not completely useless data. By itself, all data is good data. The problem is when they don't make any other data that is also important and display incomplete data as if it was complete. Having less peak pressure isn't sooo bad, if you use this as one metric to have less sound. But as the only thing, again, it's incomplete and thus dishonest.
  
  2
- Aono on Aug 31, 2024
  
  That’s exactly right. “Lying by omission” is one harsh but fair way to characterize it, because they DO actually know better. They know it’s not a real presentation of risk to the operator or bystander, but they just keep proceeding year after year as if it were, relying on industry outlets to carry their message/marketing for them. It only makes sense if the actual point is just to keep sales flowing, but specifically by preserving their customers’ ignorance with regard to what peak dB is actually useful for. Peak dB is relevant for silencer development, where you need a means of measuring the effects of iterative design changes. But it’s not relevant at all for an end user trying to holistically assess safety risk. And again: they know all of this, and have known this since before they ever got together in the barn in the first place.
  Their entire indoor testing setup even prevents them from using the damage risk criterion algorithms that specify Mil-Std free field (not indoor) testing. Yet they still keep promising that they’ll replicate what PEW does one day, even as the choices they’ve made with their setup just take them further from that possibility. That’s not even a lie “by omission” anymore, but rather just straight up deception (or at best confusion/incompetence) on their part.
  
  All because TBAC happens to have a barn, in middle of nowhere Wyoming? In a word, it is just: silly. At least one of those companies has said they think PEW should use this data and properly evaluate it for them, for free, because they can’t/don’t know how, and despite the relatively primitive nature of their apparatus and their fundamentally flawed data capturing setup. I strongly suspect this is all about ego at the end of the day, since it makes so little sense and is so high effort.
  
  2
- Nick Bosco 6 days ago
  
  Have you taken a moment to actually look at the data, or are you just assuming it's only single peak because that's what TFB put in the post? There is tons of data for each can, including all the wave forms. It's all the same data Jay uses, just not reduced down to a nicely packaged proprietary rating. You have to actually analyze the data. But if you really just want quick & dirty comparison, the db*ms and dBA LEQ do represent the cascading peaks over time.
  
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Silencer Saturday #344: Thunderbeast Arms Silencer Summit 2024

Test Setup

.223 Suppressors / 16” AR-15 (5.56)

.30 Suppressor / 16” AR-15 (5.56)

Conclusion

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