How noisy (or quiet) your car is

Just a few weeks ago I drove my brother's '10 Wrangler from Kansas City down to Little Rock. It's a soft-top, but it's just got 32" all-terrains on it. I was amazed at how quiet it was. It was quieter than some old pickups I've owned even. Those tires and roof rack of yours must really howl.

Maybe it's the difference between the A/Ts and M/Ts, but I can tell you my roof rack is LOUD. I have to put my radio up pretty high to even hear it at highway speeds.
 
For about a month now my car has very quiet.
:drums:

In all seriousness, it's reasonably quiet, the shifter knob rattles on occasion, and the over head trim to which the sun visors are mounted to buzzes at speed, but I've had worse. Of course the lifters used clacket all over the place, but you know, they're not in the car anymore.
 
Running somewhat loud winter tires all year, apart from that there is only the distant/muted V6 rumble at 2100rpm at 120km/h = Quite pleasant.
 
Just you lot wait until KaJuN comes along. :p

Alright, time to win this thread! :lol:

Where to start? At slow speeds the rattles are what dominate the ears and the Series have every type of rattle you can imagine; drivetrain vibration, leafsprings clanking together, loose-fitting bonnet flapping around. This is all made worse by stiffer than normal suspension and no insulation whatsoever. Another noisemaker is the Detroit Locker in the rear differential. It whines when just driving along and makes very loud bangs going round slow corners. As speeds pick up to about 30mph or so the tire roar comes in. Aggressive cross-ply rubber isn't very stealthy. The 'Detroit Drone' as I've come to call it also gets louder with increasing speed. Finally, the air doesn't like being pushed around a brick and it lets its displeasure be known. Somehow the wind noise doesn't manage to drown out any of the other noises, it's just added in on top of them.

I'm fairly certain the noise level in the cabin when going 60mph is well above any health and safety requirements for mandatory hearing protection.

To put it all in layman's terms I'll describe a practical demonstration. I was driving along in a little convoy on the way to a day of muddy fun and we decided to use little walkie talkies (see below) to keep in touch on the road. Before we set off I had to turn the volume down because it was way too loud to be comfortable. Once we hit our cruising speed of 55mph the radio was completely useless. I turned it back up all the way and held it right up to my ear like a phone. I couldn't hear anything he was saying.



One of these days I'll record a video but even that won't do it justice.
 
... the engine sounds like it runs on clocks...
:lol: Yeah, it's not a "good" sounding engine. Real industrial noise once they get some miles on them. At some point someone doused the underside of my car in rubberized undercoating which cuts down a lot of noise I imagine. Of course, it also makes it a pain in the ass to work on.

Maybe it's the difference between the A/Ts and M/Ts, but I can tell you my roof rack is LOUD. I have to put my radio up pretty high to even hear it at highway speeds.
Damn. I'll advise my brother against getting a roof rack then, he was talking about buying or building one.
 
Regarding tyres, when I had my road tyres fitted I didn't think there was much of a difference in noise levels. Now I've switched back to the mud tyres though I can say there's definitely a difference, they do howl on the road. However even with the windows down it isn't unpleasant and the radio can still be heard very clearly (although it still has to be loud enough for you to feel the bass through the seat).
 
No matter what I do, my phone's app won't go above 90 dB. My car runs at 80-85 dB, but I'm not sure about the accuracy of the thing.
 
I think the trick is that you can't really use it to compare your car's measurements on your phone to someone else's measurements on their car with their phones. What it will likely be "good enough" for, is for one person's phone to make multiple measurements that can be compared relatively-reliably.

Imagine two different people tasting two difference dishes to rate spiciness. I could taste a spicier dish than my mother, but we both might call our dishes "medium-spicy" even though mine had 5x the spice. However, if you put both dishes in front of the same person, they could tell you which is spicier with reasonably-trustworthy comparables. they might not be accurate measurements of the actual "spice level" compared to real date, but you can use it to compare/rank.
 
Well put it this way.. you can't whisper something to your passenger in my car.
 
A demonstration! Microphone is clipped to the glovebox with the windows up but the top down. 4th gear @ 2k RPM at the end I think as I usually skip from 2nd to 4th in a situation like that where I reach desired speed in 2nd. I could drop it to 5th if I want to idle along.

 
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What are the lights at :22 for?
 
Looks like another traffic light if the highway is too much filled with traffic... stops incoming people from completely jamming it all up.
 
What are the lights at :22 for?

Ramp Meter

They're generally useless when a majority of drivers do not know how to merge with highway traffic in the first place.
 
What are the lights at :22 for?

Looks like another traffic light if the highway is too much filled with traffic... stops incoming people from completely jamming it all up.


Yeah, there's sensors in the road that watches traffic volume and speed and if it becomes too congested (i.e. the morning and evening commute), then they turn on and space out the flow of traffic joining the freeway.

They're generally useless when a majority of drivers do not know how to merge with highway traffic in the first place.

I don't know about Chicago but they work fine out here, Cellos88GT. I've never seen any problems. There's even a place here where there's a stop sign to enter into the flow of traffic crossing a bridge and everyone on the main road will let one car from the stop sign go in front of them as common courtesy. Not everyone on the roads of America are assholes. :)
 
I don't know about Chicago but they work fine out here, Cellos88GT. I've never seen any problems. There's even a place here where there's a stop sign to enter into the flow of traffic crossing a bridge and everyone on the main road will let one car from the stop sign go in front of them as common courtesy. Not everyone on the roads of America are assholes. :)

The meters here are pretty archaic. The meter at the highway on ramp I use, causes traffic to routinely back up into the street during rush hour and causes all sorts of issues. On top of that, the meters are excruciatingly slow and I view them as a general waste of gas. I usually blow past them.

The ones in CA, specifically Los Angeles, work A LOT better.
 
Tested Laguna today with android app "Sound Meter" and SGS3. At 100 km/h with air condition at minimum settings 67-68 dB, which is exactly the same figures as the Laguna got from reviews. So pretty accurate little app it seems.

This is one of the most silent cars I've had to date. Need to test with Scorpio and Buick too. My guess is that Scorpio gets roughly the same figures, and Buick is a little bit more noisy. Not too much that one either.

Road I was driving was quite bad, though, on better new asphalt it gets a bit more silent:
20130716_081235.jpg
 
Smartphones aren't good for measuring sound levels as every kind has a different microphone in it, not to mention there's automatic gain.
 
Are we going to have to add a sound meter to the care package?

mini_digital_sound_level_meter.jpeg
 
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