Made it out again this last weekend. We had intended to do a huge comparison, and I brought every suppressor I own. It didn't work out quite that way, but we did get to compare some cans.

All .22 testing done with a wide variety of brands and listed velocities.
All 5.56 testing done with PMC XTAC 55gr.
Bystanders were three other shooters arrayed at 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 about a dozen paces out at locations marked with chemlights for all comparisons for consistency. We rotated around to hear various cans and hosts from different places.

22 handguns -

Hosts:
M&P 22X
FN 502
Taurus TX22
Ruger Charger 8" SBR - Given the barrel length, I'm lumping it in here.

Cans: B&T Tiger, Silencero Sparrow, PWS BDE, CAT SR A1 & A2, SAW Katan, Klik, 9mm Shiv, and a Form 1 flow-through can printed out of PET-CF.

All ammo, from CCI Quiet and CCI Clean to Federal Auto Match and Remington Gold Bullet bulk, even the Aguila "Super Duper Extra Extra High Velocity" blah blah was subsonic out of all hosts, which kind of surprised me with the 8" barrel on the Charger. I guess you don't need a 2" barrel to keep subsonic, despite what the Volquartsen Mamba and similar stubby pistol hosts would lead some people to believe simply by nature of existing. Maybe in cooler weather with the different barometric pressure and all that, but we didn't have a .22 round go supersonic all night.

That's right, the Form 1 cans are starting to make it out to shoots. Pretty amazing stuff, considering the cost. I wouldn't take one of these over an industry-standard offering after getting to hear one, but honestly? For something like $1.50 in materials including the thread adapter, this was actually pretty impressive. Not knowing what to expect, and not expecting much, we shot it first on all the hosts. It does what it's supposed to do, and subsonic ammo was pretty quiet. I'd put it slightly above the 9mm Shiv, and right up there with the BDE and Sparrow... which is to say nowhere near the new 3D printed offerings. And that's all the discussion the Sparrow and BDE warrant going forward for me. Yup, massive, dramatic difference in volume reduction, both to the shooter and all bystanders with all hosts and all ammo tested.

Quietest can of the night was the CAT Short Round A2, which they now call "The Ben." It was only very slightly quieter than the B&T Print-X Tiger, however. All four of us who showed up for the shoot brought a Tiger, and the guy who had several thousand bucks worth of .22 cans that we didn't end up shooting all of and brought the two CAT cans said the Tiger was the winner. For the money, it just can't be beat currently by anything on the market. Going rate is $400, and if you search frequently on the aggregators, can be found for $319 and as low as $250something as recently as a week ago. Compare that to $600 and up for the CAT offerings and it gets awful hard to justify spending twice the money for "it's quieter, but not by a hell of a lot." I don't care what anyone has to compare it to, the Tiger is just the best .22 can on the market.

The Klik is meant for longer barrel .22's. It's unpleasant on handguns and didn't seem notable different on the Charger, but I have shot that can on an 18" barreled 77/22 and it's pretty amazing what it'll do on a rifle. It does take enough of the edge off a pistol, but honestly, I'd skip this one unless you have a rifle you want to tame with the smallest thing possible. The Katan was pretty good, but it wasn't as good as the Tiger. It has some first round pop, and like all the SAW cans whether they do or not, it gets quieter with successive shots from what little their cans actually gas stack, but it's a flow-through, low backpressure design. The Tiger is a high backpressure design. For a .22, I'm not sure flow-through is necessary, or maybe even desirable. The Tiger just smokes everything, it's ridiculous.

I try to be as objective as possible, and I am no brand loyalist. If I were to suggest to anyone buying a .22 suppressor right now, that's the one.

Of note was that the FN 502 was the quietest pistol host in terms of action noise. It's a really nice shooting pistol, I was quite impressed. I like FN rifles, I do not care for FN handguns, but that was a really pleasant shooter. I won't dump my M&P 22X for it, I'm quite amused by it's metallic "pink!" sound with every shot, but if one wanted a really quiet .22 pistol host that takes 20rd mags, that's a solid option.


5.56 rifles -

Hosts:
11.5" URGI from my previous test, but now with a Griffin Mk2 lower and Griffin's suppressor optimized buffer with a Strike Ind. flatwire spring.
That's all I bothered with on this one, we mostly shot .22.


Cans: SAW Tisha 5.56, Ekron .30 & 5.56, B&T XH-556.

We didn't do a lot of extensive comparison this shoot. The guy who owns all the B&T cans didn't get the memo about us wanting to do some comparisons, so he only brought the one 5.56 XH. That said, it was interesting to compare it on my rifle. The Tisha wound up being the quietest to the shooter, and to the bystanders this time out. I cannot explain this, but perhaps it was host dependent and since we didn't try everything on multiple hosts to get an averaged-out impression of everything, it may just be that the 11.5 URGI in this iteration likes that can the best. Next quietest was the .30 cal Ekron, which surprised me a little, but their sales guy told me flat out that all that surface area does a lot against that extra exit diameter for smaller projectiles. He's not wrong. The B&T came in dead last, which frankly shocked me after how much I and everyone else love the Tiger. The XH was honestly kind of a loud can, which was and still is surprising to me, given how large it is. It is definitely one of the suppressors of all time. The guy who owns it was the first one to call out the Tisha as quieter, in the interests of objectivity.

Bonus:
SBR'ed PS90

Ammo:
Fiocchi Range Dynamics 40gr
Fiocchi Range Dynamics 62gr Subsonic

Cans: SAW Tisha 5.56, Ekron .30 & 5.56, B&T XH-556.

This one was just for giggles. All the same cans because Plan B all the things. Shockingly, the results were an analog of our testing with the 5.56. The Tisha was the quietest, by a lot. I cannot explain this. It defies explanation, really. I would've through the Ekrons would have been quieter on this gun, given that it's a blowback gun, but hey. So the most compact PDW thing I own likes the most compact can I own. That's not a bad thing. On r/NFA, this combo is getting a lot of attention with an FRT thrown in as a new meta build because it spits out a lot of ammo very quickly, reasonably quietly, and just doesn't move around a lot under recoil while mag dumping with an FRT. I can see it.

We didn't end up doing much more comparison after that. We got severe weather alerts of a dust storm rolling through, and it didn't even take that, we could see the lightning on the horizon headed our way. I did make a point to put the Incolite 9M on my Resilient titanium tri lug mount in the long configuration and shoot it on my friend's AP5. 147gr subs were absolutely painless without ear pro. It was pleasant, even. Zero port pop, and incredibly quiet. I left it on there and on his tailgate, and when the wind started to pick up, I started packing up. At some point, I heard "did you just shoot that?" One of the guys picked it up and put a half magazine of subs through it at our designated shooting line, and the guy who owns the AP5 didn't hear it over the wind. Gusts around 15mph, nothing crazy. It's very, very quiet. I think that combo may have actually sold me on the notion that I need to put together a classic MP5 style build just because. No rails, no gadgets, just something straight out of an 80's action flick with that Incolite on it.



A note about cleaning 3D printed suppressors:

Cleaning and "user serviceable" get discussed a lot. It really is as simple as just soaking the thing in a glass jar with some CLR for titanium, or Breakthrough Suppressor cleaner for essentially anything. If you're new to shooting suppressed, congratulations, whatever you end up buying, an ultrasonic cleaner is now what I would consider part of the required gear. Your guns will get dirtier no matter what can you have and how you want to clean it, and you will spend a lot more time cleaning them. Or. Spend $100-150 on an ultrasonic cleaner of the dimensions that will best serve you. They are quite literally all made in China. Nobody outside of China really manufactures this stuff for the end home-user, so accept that and just buy the gear. You will want some glass jars that fit whatever you want to clean in it so that you can isolate whatever solution is appropriate to the materials of the part going in there so you're not changing water every time, and then you want to buy Simple Green Aircraft grade (it won't immediately destroy anodized aluminum, so use it for that), you'll want Simple Green for steel parts, you'll want 99% ISO alcohol, and you'll want to buy several cans of brake cleaner. Congrats, you're now equipped to clean everything from a .22 pistol caked in carbon and crud to a 3D printed titanium can that you cannot take apart. Cleaning a 3D printed can is super simple. You only have to unscrew it from the barrel and stick it in a jar of your chosen solvent. You can either stop there, or you can throw it in your new ultrasonic cleaner heated to about 50C and run it for anywhere from a half hour, to hours. Longer cycles can eat Cerakote, so you've been warned. You'll know it's working by the fact that whatever you soak it in will turn black and there will be a layer of sediment that forms. Congratulations, your can is clean. How do you know? When you shoot it, it will make your gunshots quiet. Anything more than that, and you're overthinking it and probably really like playing with your wiener.

Do this a couple times a year, or every couple range trips, or every 3-5k rounds, or if it's a rifle can, maybe never and you'll be fine. I really only bother with this level of cleaning for my 9mm cans because 9mm subsonic is some filthy shit, and the cans and the guns get absurdly filthy. .22 kinda goes without saying here as well.