Look I get the impulse to defend TBAC here and I think Ray gets a worse rap than he deserves. Yeah TBAC validated Jay's raw waveform data early on, that's true. But agreeing that a microphone captured a pressure trace accurately is not the same thing as endorsing the entire analytical stack built on top of it. The Suppression Rating formula is proprietary and has never been published or peer reviewed anywhere. The hearing damage model it depends on (AHAAH from Army Research Lab) was flagged by the Army's own AIBS peer review panel with the explicit recommendation that "the model user should assume only unwarned ears at this time" due to skepticism about anticipated middle ear muscle contraction. A 2018 study by Scherer et al. using laser Doppler vibrometry to directly measure middle ear muscle response found anticipatory contraction was not reliably present in the tested population and concluded the warned option should not be used for injury risk calculation (published in Hearing Research, 2018). A separate NIOSH analysis of the Blast Overpressure study data by Murphy, Khan, and Shaw found that LAeq8hr actually provided a better statistical fit to real injury data than AHAAH in several comparisons. Jay buries a footnote on SSS.3 admitting the warned/unwarned debate exists and that newer cochlear energy models look promising, then defaults to warned ARUs anyway because it gives him more "data granularity" between cans. So when Ray or anyone else pushes back on the methodology, they're not being sore losers, they're pointing at real published literature that questions core assumptions in Jay's pipeline. Saying "TBAC validated the data" as a gotcha only works if you pretend raw waveform capture and a proprietary composite rating are the same thing, and they aren't.

And the broader issue nobody wants to engage with is the structural problem with how Jay's operation works. The Suppression Rating has zero independent replication from any outside laboratory. The PEW-SOFT hardware and software is entirely custom and closed source. The primary sample size is 5 shots per configuration, which anyone who has done blast testing knows is not enough to establish statistical confidence when people are online arguing about 2 point rating differences. For context, Murphy et al. (2017, International Journal of Audiology) used hemisphere microphone arrays at 200 kHz sample rate, multiple positions, and standardized protocols that are openly documented and reproducible. The TBAC/Silencer Summit test methodology has been discussed to death and I'm not relitigating it, but at minimum that effort involved multiple manufacturers testing side by side with documented procedures and data you can actually look at. Meanwhile Jay's entire output is one lab, one guy's software, one guy's secret formula, generating one number that now drives purchasing decisions across the entire suppressor market. That's not a standard, it's a monopoly on perceived credibility.

None of this means Jay's raw data is bad or that his waveform capture isn't high quality. It probably is. But treating the Suppression Rating like settled science when it's built on a disputed hearing model running in its less conservative mode, processed through undisclosed math, with no external validation and tiny sample sizes is exactly the kind of thing that should get questioned. Ray raising objections doesn't make him a fraud, it makes him an engineer who disagrees with another engineer's methodology, and the actual peer reviewed literature backs up a lot of those concerns. If the community spent half as much energy reading the AHAAH criticism papers as they do calling Ray a crybaby, the conversation would be a lot more productive.