Byron fires up both the 2020 Giulia Quadrifoglio and his personal 2013 Challenger 392 to see which has a louder cold start.
Transcript- Hey, everybody. It's Byron. Welcome back to my garage.
You are sitting on top of my 2013 Challenger SRT8. Behind me is the Autoblog 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. This is a sexy little car. It looks good, it sounds good, and it goes pretty fast. The car you're on top of looks good, sounds good, doesn't go quite as fast.
What I want to do today is focus on the noise. It's disgusting outside, so I don't really feel like going out there-- especially because the Challenger's already filthy, and I don't need to get the white paint on this looking like garbage before I take photos later this week. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to shut the garage door most of the way-- safety first-- and I'm going to fire up each one of these with this handy little sound meter app I downloaded on my phone.
This isn't going to be very scientific, but really what I want to do is see which one of these has a louder cold start. The bonus is that I, and therefore you, get to listen to two pretty cool exhaust notes for science. What's not to like? Let's see how it works.
So as I'm getting this set up here, we're showing ambient out here right now is in probably the 45 to 50 decibel range. Again, this isn't meant to be scientific. The whole point is to get a relative measurement, not an absolute measurement.
So this is a smartphone app. It's not going to be very accurate most likely. You know, the microphone, the case, all these things can impact the measurements it's taking. So really treat it like a dyno. We're trying to see if it's louder, not loud, if that makes sense.
So I'm going to set this up right here in front of the camera. We'll fire this one up, get our baseline, and then I'll go over to the Alfa and do the same thing again.
[ENGINE STARTING]
OK. So with the Challenger, looks like we spiked up to 83.7 decibels max. And honestly, from just watching the vide, I think that sound might have been more the starter than the actual exhaust. So you know, great big truck engine. It's got a great big truck starter on it. So clearly this means I need to upgrade the Challenger's exhaust. Anyway, we're going to move on to the Alfa now and see what we see.
[ENGINE STARTING]
So as you can see here, we're looking at 81.6 decibels from the Alfa, which is about 2 decibels less than what we measured from the Challenger. And having gone back and actually looked at the video, that reading did come from the exhaust startup, not from the starter cranking over. So it looks like in this case the 6.4-liter naturally aspirated V8 in an American-ish muscle car is louder than the twin-turbo 6-cylinder in a small Italian sports sedan. Go figure.
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