I agree. Fair testing would be nearly impossible. Cheating would be more than prevelant and the results would would be near meaningless.

Other problems. There is variance among individual bows - sometimes it's huge. Some manfacturers load their bows with sound dampening devices. Other's price the bows lower and let the buyer put his favorite ones on. So, do you test them as they come from the manufacturer, or somehow come up with a standard configuration of dampening add-ons, to compare apples with apples?

Do it really matter what they come from the factory sounding like? Not much in my opinion. I always do extra things to dampen sound on my bows. The quietest bow I've ever heard was a cheap Martin I owned. I took extra pains to make it so. It was probably 3 times as loud off the shelf, before my enhancements. So the fact that a test rates one bow as 1 decibel louder than another, doesn't matter to me. When I get done witht them, neither will be as loud as they were in the test.