Yeah it is sad, I have masters degree in environmental sciences and did noise measurements in a job + also 80 page study about noise measurements as part of the education + my boss were the most respected noise measurement expert in the country. And I dont remember seeing one (1) professionally made measurement from consoles so far, of any gen
And people believe these, because they have zero knowledge and/or they are gullible. They dont know shit about sound or measurements = any baboon with phone app is expert to them, sadly. People I met in the job, regular people, none had real understanding and they made wrong assumptions like few seconds of measuring is good(it is not) indicator, that how they get annoyed is certain mark that levels are illegal and so on.
I could bet this twitter baboon have phone app as "noise meter" as 99% have and think it have anything to do with calibrated professional equipment. And thinking how his "300 dollar mic" tells anything about the situation is stupid, it is probably some mic made for talking, not measuring noise. So those mics have some filters to make sound quality better usually. Good professional noise meters cost easily thousands (reason why they are almost never used in these "tests")
It is frustrating when people claim the system is "silent" or "whisper quiet", those literally tell nothing and mean nothing. Only professionally made measurements using standards tell the truth.
otherwise it is just random measurement, anything can fuck it up
- wrong equipment
- background noises (loud fans / ventilation / road traffic etc) = console can be noisy as fuck but these noises mask it = it is now "silent"
- wrong distance / different distances in different measurements
- wrong angle / side of device
- and 10 things more
devices must be measured in dampened "quiet room" with really low background noise levels, using same standards, calculating average from all/most sides from the device.
noise is subjective so reports are just personal feelings, not reality
Basically any device with fan is audible, only silent consoles are old NES/SNES era systems and even those emit tiny amount of noise in theory.
tl;dr it is safe to say that almost all internet console noise measurements are useless, as they are done wrongly + without professional equipment & environment