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Posted: 8/15/2026 10:18:56 PM EDT
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Griffin Armament suppressor comparison videos contain Auditory Risk Units (ARUs) from the AHAAH that takes into account the entire waveform to calculate doses per week. From a search: “The Auditory Hazard Assessment Algorithm for Humans (AHAAH) takes into account the entire waveform over time, not just the peak decibel level. It feeds the full time-history of the pressure wave through a biomechanical model of the outer, middle, and inner ear to calculate Auditory Risk Units (ARUs).” Are ARUs the most important metric for suppressor users as it relates to hearing damage risk? Are ARUs the ideal sound metric for comparing suppressors to each other? Are ARUs the published equivalent of Pew Science’s proprietary suppression rating? Why doesn’t Silencer Summit provide ARUs? |
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In a nutshell, no system or unit has yet been developed that has anything resembling a consensus among industry & experts. The subject of AHAAH is complex, but as I have come to understand it, was employed to give more latitude than mil std 1474D. AHAAH ARUs aren't arbitrary, and I won't call it useless, but one needs to bear in mind the purpose for which it was developed. Military standards have pretty limited application in the civilian world. Originally Posted By CJofFL: Why doesn’t Silencer Summit provide ARUs? The Summit, which TBAC does as a service for the industry completely on their dime with at least a half dozen staff members spending an entire week doing this instead of making money for the company, gives us raw data and waveforms that can be used for whatever assessment and algorithmic model one likes. I can only imagine the time investment for them to run all that through algorithms to produce some flavor of ARU for literally hundreds of suppressors. That'd be a REALLY big ask. |
Suppress all the things!
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I heard the AHAAH tool was employed by the auto industry to study the ~178DB or whatever it is sound of air bag deployment to ascertain its risk to hearing. So its not a military only tool that hasn’t been recognized by any other industry as useful to understanding risk and safety. The unfortunate part of AHAAH is that you need wave forms to test it, and those are large files (essentially extremely high speed audio recordings at the system sampling speed, pulled manually out of hbk and saved), and the analysis is through several manual processing steps that sort of make it a little like developing film. For 3 slides [1 per mic location], processing time might be 15 minutes. So you save the waveforms record the peak z for the form, click and move a mouse and calibrate peak spl, and select the time to look at, run statistics, and process and save a file and open that file and select time again and process for aru dosing warned (person knows they are shooting). Then you have a slide you screen capture. 1 slide. The human operator will develop fatigue and wear out after about 3 hours of this work. That limits a day to about 12 analyzed 5 rd strings. Now much better computer people than me might be able to automate this process to some limited extent with a custom software tool made by a developer. That way maybe they could ahaah analyze every shot and average the 5 rd string for each mic location to improve delivery via harnessing computing power and automation in a similar time spend. Better still would be an HBK software tool made to process it automatically. Until that is developed, the summit is just way too much data collection to do this function. They invested a week in testing alone already, with probably another week in web hosting work behind that- and ahaah manually would likely blow that up to ~2-3 months of invested time. I want to say as a general observation, aru stuff generally favors the can with lower peak and lower leq (average unweighted sound over time). The summit data shows leq, and leaq. Its not super hard and fast. Shorter signatures are better at times also so its crunching a lot of factors to make its assessment of risk, but some or all of that is available in the summit data, allowing scientific wild ass guesses to be made, which might reach 50% or better predictions of AHAAH outcomes (I haven’t tested this so that’s a theory). The unfortunate reality of really sophisticated metrological testing systems is that the cloud of data becomes tough to sift through. So a layperson is ideally expected to crunch length, diameter, volume, muzzle left and right peak A/Z ear peak A/Z and leq and leaq to have the best ability to access what happened in the test. Aka two cans get tested- one is twice the volume of the other, the larger is .5db more quiet peak, and has 1db lower leq- this is a situation where the winner is actually the smaller barely imperceptibly lower performing can. It is more practical and providing similar performance. In another example with two similar size cans- maybe the peak levels are similar but one can has leq 4 db quieter than the other- thats the better can with likely the better dosing safety. |
Austin, Managing Partner - www.GriffinArmament.com
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