.A 105 firing is a loud boom (I know that one very well, having served on a 105 gun crew for four months - and the only ear plugs we had were cigarette filters). When that 105 round arrived, it had a different sound entirely - a shattering "slam", a sharp crack.
Aircraft bombs are much louder and have a distinctive deep Steel-door-slamming sound - see the current videos of the Israeli bombs being dropped on Hamas strongpoints to hear what they sound like.
Rifle caliber weapons including machine guns have three sounds: the crack of the round leaving the muzzle of the weapon, the sonic crack from the supersonic flight of the round through the air and the "breaking pine board" sound of the round hitting something. You get a hundred or so men firing plus an equal number of the enemy firing in your direction, you get some idea of aural mayhem of a full-on firefight. And that chattering roar is punctuated every few seconds by the slam and whistle of the fragments of grenades being thrown.
Years ago, I had dinner with one of Hollywood's premier sound engineers - "Doc" Siegel. I spoke to him of the unrealism of the way war movies presented the sounds of weapons and he glared at me and said "we give them what the audiences EXPECTS to hear!" and that was the end of our discussion.
Interesting stories and observations. Thanks.
I suspect that there is simply NO WAY that any electronics and loudspeaker system can physically recreate the actual noises made by bombs, shells, gunfire, grenades, etc. They can be a close approximation, but must always fall short.
If they reproduced the sound of an M79 and the sound of that 40mm exploding, most non veterans wouldn’t believe it. They want BOOM! not crump…
My uncle was a bomber pilot in WWII. His plane was shot up by a German fighter. he said it wasn’t a neat line of bullet holes like the movies show. He said the bullets came in all at once in a clump, blew a big hole in the side of the plane and sounded like someone threw a bucket of bolts through a tin roof.