Thread: OEM or aftermarket muffler options

Agreed with Randy. Really nice exhaust Mattick.

With turbo (actual turbo not turbo muffler), you can run 0 resonators and a muffler and it will be quiet. If your wanting to run no mufflers, then two resonators (which are usually just round mufflers), should be sufficient, make sure the outside can is much bigger then the pipe though.



OEM mufflers are oval because they need to be able to fit all the pipe bends, walls etc, I don't know if nissan guys have cut away their mufflers, so here is an STI muffler for an example:


Here is why round mufflers get bad rep, if you have a 3" pipe , your typical can is gonna be 3.5"-1". So you only have .5"-1 of padding. An oval muffler will have .5-1" ontop and 3-5" on sides. If you can find a round muffler with 3-5" all the way around you will be best off. There is an EVO guy who is running a 3 straight through exhaust with a properly sized round muffler and it is as quiet as stock, when he ran oval mufflers it was much louder. I might have to go find that thread again.



In that video is with a Borla resonator 3" in/out, 5" can, it's listed in the youtube video description, just forgot to add it to the post above.

NA VE no resonator:


NA VE with 5" can Borla Resonator:



Back to turbo, same setup with 5" Borla can, sti muffler etc.

Turbo makes it quieter we all know this. NA is louder, we all know this. These raspy god awful video re-posts are not required.

OEM mufflers are definitely mostly all oval shaped. A basic geometry student can tell you this. The external shell is oval shaped to house the internals. The internals in the oval mufflers are made to remove sound waves from leaving the system.... plain and simple.

And finally, the best part is that sound reception is a rather subjective field because of us! People. We would be silly to simply apply a decibel level to accept as the sole measure of unit for sound without addressing frequency. Certain freq. will be removed in an oval system than the round system will allow to escape or be unable to cancel out because of incorrect reverberations. Frequency of sound waves will be unable to disperse as well in a round object than in an oval shaped object. That is the science and truth involved without forum talk or videos.

Hopes this helps someone.

To be specific, I am going to run 2.5", mandrel bent, two (2) Vibrant Ultra resonators and a Vibrant Stealth muffler. Plus a GT2560R.

I'm looking for stock-like noise levels or quieter.

I'm curious how your setup will sound Shawn. I've been holding off on the stealth muffler for some reason.

Found the Evo thread I was talking about earlier.



Not gonna argue one vs the other, just pointing out what others have noticed in real life. I personally am tempted to try a big round muffler in the rear over my STI muffler setup just to see if it fits better.





Consider running their twin tip version, should help even more. With resonators are you talking about their ultra quiet resonators or the bottle style ones? Ultra quiet ones look pretty good.

Thanks! Cant wait to get it on and fire it up!

I think @Doug Fab has experience with both resonator types.

Ultra quiet (the oval one) is the resonator Shawn B has picked.

Ultra quiets need modification of the tunnel to fit just fyi. Nothing a bfh doesn't fix just something to be aware of it you want to use them.