Why?
Guns are really, really, really loud, typically well over 150 dB. But they also have nearly all of their power at the high frequency range, about 1-1.5 kHz. Listen to this to get an idea of how high that is:
Guns are really, really, really loud, typically well over 150 dB. But they also have nearly all of their power at the high frequency range, about 1-1.5 kHz. Listen to this to get an idea of how high that is:
The problem entertainment has is that really loud, high pitches are extremely unpleasant to the listener. This because sound intensity, which which is how much power is delivered by an acoustic wave to a unit of area, is proportional to the square of the frequency. Movies tend to peak around 90 dB, but if all that were in the 1-1.5 kHz range, it could really damage your eardrums. Consequently, that kind of loudness is reserved for low-frequency bass tones.
In order to make guns sound loud, movies and video games tend to rely on a few tricks. Some are quite clever, like reducing the volume of other sounds to make the guns sound louder by comparison. But nearly all of them just lower the sound of the gun so they can amplify its loudness. If you watch enough action movies or play enough video games, you probably think handguns and rifles make loud, booming noises. But even the biggest machine guns don't boom, they bang.
The funny thing is World at War and Black Ops used a lot of authentic gun sounds...and were widely panned by game critics and gamers alike for their "thin, unrealistic" gun sounds. By contrast, the Modern Warfare series, which sounds like it uses a lot of synthetic audio, was praised for its sound, and every game in the series won awards from the game industry for its sound design. Because people think guns have bass-heavy booming sounds, this is what an AK-47 sounds like in MW3, as compared to real life:
But if you ask me, the first of these sounds a lot more like the real thing:
