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:

Silencer Saturday #343: YHM Maxim Woodsman .22LR Silencer Saturday #342: What Is The Best First Silencer Silencer Saturday 341: The Case For (Some) Non-standard Thread Pitches Silencer Saturday #340: The SHUSH Act Reintroduced In Congress Silencer Saturday #339: SilencerCo’s Little-known A2 ASR Flash Hider

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.

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 earSE 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.