What exactly causes the BANG! sound in a gun?
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the pressure wave of the expanding gas.
you have a cartridge, with the main power charge, a primer and a bullet. the firearm sets off the primer, which in turn sets off the main charge, and creates a huge pressure spike, that forces the bullet down the barrel. when the plug of the bullet is removed, you get an expanding shockwave of pressure.
suppressors work by slowing down this pressure wave and thus making the impulse (and thus volume) lower.
Sound is pressure waves. A gun is a tube full of very very high pressure. As the bullet leaves, the pressure is allowed to escape, and this extremely high pressure escaping suddenly produces a short but violent burst of pressure waves. Sound. This is known as the report.
A good suppressor can mitigate the report. If the report is quiet enough, you’ll instead hear the sound of the gun operating as well as the sonic boom of the bullet. The latter is best described as a snap, but very loud. It’s not really an experience that can be described or even very well understood through recordings.
If you’re a decent distance downrange from the gun, you may not hear the report at all over the snap, or you may hear the snap first and then the report later.
In the case of subsonic, well-suppressed firearms they become uncomfortably quiet.
You are causing a tiny piece of metal to both break the sound barrier and it’s propelled by an explosion..
There are 2 or 3 separate things that make sounds when a gun fires. The first is the actual mechanical movement of the gun’s parts, although this is not very loud. The second is the sonic boom from the bullet as it leaves the barrel – many but not all bullets have supersonic muzzle velocities. The last and loudest part is the rapidly expanding gas. The bullet is propelled out of the gun by extremely high pressure hot gas. That gas follows the bullet out of the gun, and that extreme pressure wave becomes an extreme sound wave.
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