Vane vs. Broadhead Noise

The internet is full of broadhead-noise anecdotes. The usual claim is that once you screw on a loud fixed-blade head, vane choice stops mattering.

To test that, we took the quietest and loudest vanes from the standard-speed vane sound test and paired them with a field point, the quiet broadhead, and the two loudest broadheads we tested.

The vanes and broadheads we picked were:

• Quietest vane: Flex Fletch FFP-360
• Loudest vane: Flex Fletch SK2
• Quietest broadhead: Toulou
• Loudest broadheads: Slick Trick Standard 4 Blade and Iron Will Vented

This sound testing was conducted by The Archery Sound Lab, who shot these arrows through their Arrow Sound Testing Chamber using their own bow, shooting machine, and instrumentation.

The first two plots show overall peak loudness with 95% confidence intervals. Lower is quieter.

For full details on the acoustic setup, fly-by recording process, and weighted SPL analysis, check out the Sound Testing Methods page.

Hover over the dots in any plot to see the build configuration and sound results.

Lower dB is quieter. A 10dB increase is roughly a doubling of perceived loudness.

In the frequency response overlay, switch between Z, A, and Deer weighting to see how the same arrow changes for different listeners.

Deer-weighting is the strongest version of the broadhead-noise argument in this dataset.

The FFP-360 with a field point is quiet at about 51.7dB deer-weighted. Put the Slick Trick Standard 4 Blade on that same vane and it jumps to about 66.3dB. That is louder than the SK2 with the quieter Toulou, which sits around 62.4dB.

So yes, a loud broadhead can more than erase the advantage of a quiet vane.

But the vane still matters. With field points, the SK2 is about 10.5dB louder than the FFP-360. With the Toulou, the spread is still about 7.3dB. Even with the Slick Trick, the SK2 build stays a bit louder than the FFP-360 build.

Human-weighting shifts the story. Our ears put less weight on some of the high-frequency energy that makes fixed-blade broadheads stand out to deer.

On this scale, the FFP-360 stays quieter than the SK2 across the rows we tested. The FFP-360 with Slick Trick comes in around 58.0dB A-weighted, while the SK2 with a field point is already around 61.7dB.

The broadhead still adds noise. The Iron Will Vented on the SK2 is the loudest human-weighted row in this plot at about 70.0dB. But if you are only listening with human ears, the vane baseline is a big part of what you hear.

Overall peak loudness is useful, but it compresses the whole sound profile into one number.

The overlay below lets you pick any subset of the vane and broadhead combinations and compare their full 1/3-octave spectra. Switch between Z, A, and Deer weighting to see why the same arrow can look different to a hunter and to a whitetail.

The plot above only crosses the four sound-screen broadheads with the FFP-360 and SK2. The plot below adds the matching Max Stealth standard build rows for those same broadheads, so each head has up to three vane baselines next to it: FFP-360, SK2, and Max Stealth.

Sorted quietest to loudest, deer-weighted. Each row is one vane + point combination. The pattern from above holds: the vane sets a baseline and the broadhead stacks on top.

Broadhead noise does not wipe out vane choice. It stacks on top of it.

In the deer-weighted plot, the broadhead can dominate a single comparison: FFP-360 plus Slick Trick is louder than SK2 plus Toulou. In the human-weighted plot, the vane baseline is strong enough that the FFP-360 combinations stay quieter than the SK2 combinations we tested.

A few caveats:

• This is not a complete vane-by-broadhead matrix. The FFP-360 was not paired with the Iron Will Vented in this subtest.
• These are sound-protocol results from The Archery Sound Lab setup. Different speeds, shafts, vane orientations, bows, and heads can shift the exact numbers.
• This article is only about in-flight sound. It does not answer terminal ballistics questions, broadhead durability, or which setup groups best.