3 Effective Ways To Quiet Down Your Loud Exhaust
Original Story from: Driveslate.com/Autoblog
You’re probably in my situation, where you cold start a car and you’re just praying that you’re not waking up your neighbours. Or when you see a police and you shift up a few gears just to be on the lowest RPM to not attract attention. I personally had the experience of just triggering car alarms in the mall parking garage by just starting the car.
What is the science behind why my exhaust is so loud?
To understand why your exhaust is so loud, it’s time for a little refresher on sound waves and frequencies. Sound can be differentiated by high and low frequencies. Low frequency sounds is like the booming bass from your subwoofer, whereas high frequency sounds is like the sound of birds chirping.
Lower frequencies travel further and more difficult to absorb, therefore it explains why you can hear the booming bass from the guy beside you, but barely hear the lyrics.
To reduce the noise from your exhaust, the only way is to cancel out low frequencies. Silencers and resonators do this by manipulating the sound waves by bouncing sound waves together to cancel themselves out.
So back to the point, here are 3 effective ways you can use to quiet down your loud exhaust and let’s discuss the pros and cons of each option.
Add Silencers — Beginner Level of Knowledge
At the cost of aesthetics, silencers are a very effective method to softening the sound of your loud exhaust. An exhaust silencer is essentially a plug to your exhaust and is inserted via the exhaust tips. The installation is also very simple as it only requires a hole to be drilled into your exhaust tips so that the silencers can be locked into your exhaust.
Video of exhaust with vs without silencers:
There’s an on-going debate whether silencers have a direct impact to performance, and if the impact is significant. My take on this is that silencers will definitely have an impact on performance, but just ever so slightly. My argument is that the restriction occurs so far down the exhaust that you probably can’t feel the difference, given you’re not driving a twin scroll turbo car at 800+ horsepower.
Pros:
– Very Cost Effective. Silencers are super cheap, and works really well
– Super easy to install and take out. With silencers, you still HAVE the option to be loud when you want to be
Cons:
– Personally, it ruins the looks of the exhaust
– Ever so slightly decrease in performance
– Will corrode overtime that could make the exhaust even louder
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