RE: Quiet CBs
How to make a bow quiet ...............................
The answer is .................... Do not shoot it !
In all reality, the noise that the bow makes when shooting (any make, compound, recurve, longbow or crossbow) does not really matter. Before some of you get onto a soapbox to rip apart my statement, let me finish. Yes all bows will make noise with ccossbows being the loudest of them all (with recurve crossbows being the most quiet) and you can do things to quiet them some, but this is usually at the cost of arrow speed.
The trouble is, even if you make the bow totally quiet, you will not be able to quiet the arrow in flight. The arrow in flight is unbelievably loud, most times it is more loud then the firing of a crossbow. With this knowledge, I would not give up arrow speed to quiet the bow some (because it would not become quiet enough to matter to a deer's hearing). The faster you get the arrow to the point of impact, the less chance the animal will have to react before the arrow gets there.
Now a little more on why the crossbow sounds louder then most vertical bows. When you shoot the crossbow, the stock is against your cheek bone. When the bow is fired, it will viberate, because the stock is against your cheek, it wilkl transfer into your bone structure and dirrectly into your hearing (just like how your Dr's tunning fork works). The crossbows with wooden stocks will sound quieter because wood is a better dampener then the composit stocks. But again, the sound of the crossbow does not really matter but to only us humans, to a deer, sound is sound weither it is the bow being fired or the arrow in flight.
I would not worry about the sound from the bow.
Tom