I would like a real industry standard. Open and up for peer review that includes some sort of risk assessment number
Strongly in agreement, Ray
Before Pew Science, peak dB was the only standard. There was zero discussion of risk assessment, certainly not to consumers armed with OSHA alone.
In the Pew Science review of the Ultra 9 that was publicized nearly two years ago now, there are no fewer than 15 peak dB numbers listed, open for peer review. There are no fewer than 7 waveforms for the first round alone, also open for peer review. These inputs form the output for the proprietary rating.
Have you peer reviewed these inputs and found them to be inaccurate?
It's great that Jay is publishing what he does and providing a free education on suppressor performance (his podcast is somewhat difficult to listen to, but chuck full of great info so I grind my teeth and ensure).
That being said, as a fellow engineer who performs a variety of standardized testing to ensure that my junk works as intended, I find the obvious following deficiencies:
1) He has not published a list of equipment, settings/configurations, and calibration certs. I can guess at his transducer and data acq, but cannot knowingly clone it. I'm sure this is intentional.
2) He does not offer a file with the data points in a human- or machine-readable format (be it tabular or as a WAV), which prevents me from applying alternative analytical techniques which may be valid ways to interpret the results.
3) The algorithm used to go from raw data to an overall rating remains a black box. He has not offered his "inner ear model" for peer review or provided any justification for acceptable total dose, so users do not know if his limit criteria meet their own expectations.
3) His Suppression Rating score is highly subjective; i.e. "limited hunting engagement", "high volume fire", etc. Compare this to the AHAAH method of providing an objective dose and dose limit.
4) He regularly admits to withholding test results. The reasons for this are subject to assumptions that may or may not be fair to PEW Science, but it doesn't take long to form one or more hypotheses that suggest an attempt to swing the market in a direction that is favorable to the guy who has an exclusive test method and charges substantial money to access it.
In short, his results cannot be verified or reproduced, and because he takes money from test clients and also takes money from consumers to access the data, there is at least the appearance of providing favorable publicity and "gatekeeping" in exchange for monetary considerations. I couldn't get a master's degree or obtain customer acceptance of my results by occluding the test methods and raw data listed above. Jay is a good enough engineer and businessman to know all of this as well.
This isn't intended to blast Jay (I'm sure it will come off harsher than I intend), but I'm getting a bit tired of Internet randos holding him up as a deity and his conclusions as some sort of silencer Bible.