
slower than the average through the 16.12. So whether you’re looking to thin the herd of lawn-destroying gophers without alarming your neighbors, or if you simply need a low-noise alternative that helps protect your hearing while shooting, here’s a look at five of the best subsonic. Despite only possessing 10' of rifled barrel, 10 rounds of the subsonic load fired through the suppressed unit averaged 1028 f.p.s.only 15 f.p.s. 22LR cartridges are typically more accurate than their high-speed counterparts. Also, as many a competition shooter can tell you, subsonic. The Quiet-22 is still plenty lethal to stop a ravenous squirrel at 20 yards and produces roughly half the noise. Take CCI’s Mini-Mag 40-grain round-nose load, for example, which produces 1,235 fps and 135 foot-pounds (ft-lbs.) of energy, and compare it to CCI’s Quiet-22, which slows to 710 fps and 45 ft-lbs. Where subsonic ammo excels, however, is with the. Despite what you might think, much of the noise comes from the gas escaping the barrel, so subsonic rounds aren’t exactly whisper quiet, which is why many add a suppressor to the mix. The tradeoff is less energy on target, which makes going subsonic less desirable with many large hunting calibers.
#Suppressor effectiveness subsonic rounds crack#
Since the crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier greatly increases noise, subsonic ammo is designed to leave the muzzle at less than the speed of sound, which is roughly 1,125 fps at sea level. It does not and cannot suppress the 'sonic boom' caused by a supersonic bullet as it moves down range.

The truth is, there’s a time to slow things down and keep it quiet, which is why subsonic ammo exists. A silencer (or suppressor if you want) reduces or eliminates the noise of the gas escaping from the muzzle of the gun after the bullet leaves the muzzle. Not only is all that velocity-crazed volume hard on the eardrums, it’s also unfriendly to the pocket book, as anyone who has recently bought a box of ammunition for one of the newest long-range super cartridges can tell you. Just stand next to a muzzlebraked magnum or a straight-piped hot rod to get the picture.

The drawback, however, is the noise pollution that accompanies our fixation with speed. From muscle cars to overbore 22 LR Ammo cartridges that burn barrels and launch bullets downrange at well beyond 3,000 feet per second (fps), we operate on the assumption that faster is better. As red-blooded Americans, we’ve long ago come to embrace our ancestral need for speed.
