In 1965 I lived in Tripoli, Libya and saw these planes at the Tripoli airport.  They caught my attention, the Cold War was going on and these airliners were versions of the TU-95 Bear bombers, they even had the bomber type nose.  

Briefly: This is a swept wing, turboprop airliner, having more than 56,000 HP from it's four engines.  Top speed was .76 Mach, cruise was .71, compare that to turbojet airliners of the day which cruised at .83 Mach.  Total passenger load was 224, but 170 pax was more usual.  Fuel burn in cruise, after burning off some fuel, was about 2500 lb/engine/hour, less than the turbojet powered airliners.

This was a loud airliner, having significant vibration.  Vibration reduced the fatigue lift to about 14,000 hours total.  These planes began service in the early 60's and continued till about 1976, when most planes had exceeded their fatigue life.

Safety and reliability was very good, the TU-144 had no fatalities from flight crashes.

I'm thankful I got to see these planes in normal operations.

I always thought the Bearliner was cool.

Oh Communism, I miss how ironic and hypocritical you were.

I read about those once.  From what I understand, conversation was impossible on them. Counter-rotating props beating the crap out of the air are no joke.  Wiki says DB levels were 108-114.  

For comparison, I looked up some other sounds in the 108-114 range:

Sounds like a pleasant place to spend a few hours!

EDIT: Some variants had sleeping berths.  Wonder if they provided earplugs?

If this were made in the 21st century, you could probably do a lot with noise cancellation technology.  I wonder, with comparable speeds to modern jets and better fuel efficiency of turboprop engines, if a large turboprop airliner would be feasible now.  They said that the Tu114 could reach the speed of a modern airliner, but its cruising speed was less.

It was said that your first indication that a Bear bomber was around wouldn't be on radar, you'd actually hear it coming.

Looks Crashy

Cool airliner but the cabin noise would be deafening!

Fuck that

Yea, fuck that noise.  Some say, maybe aviation legend but the Bear's turboprops gave it some radar reducing qualities or it fucked with our radar somehow.

Neat old bird.

your video made me deaf.    

TU-144