Maybe I'm crazy like Ray (which I wouldn't consider an insult). I've done such things. Even on car engines or fixed in place generator engines where I worked.
Your slowed staples sound almost exactly like some rounded tops to cooking pots I have. Some of the old copper tops.
I mentioned this before, there were methane powered engines where I worked, and the room ran around 105 to 110 dbA SPL continuously. You couldn't hear much more than a roaring cacophony. Put on some ear muffs to knock the level down 25 db or so, and your ears weren't heavy in distortion any more. You could hear clearly many details of the engine. If lifters were slightly off, if timing were wrong, with a bit of practice if the mixture was off. All of that was an impenetrable roar otherwise.
This causes me to question the Dolby reference level as used by Doug Katz for loudness in mastering. 83 dbSPL for one channel with expectations of 20 db headroom. Somewhere is an article on those Elliot Sound pages of a designer who worked for a pro sound company on amps. QSC I always thought though he never says. They were doing blind testing to determine what really mattered. He said they obtained best results with average SPLs of 70 db. He said they let people set their own levels, but whenever someone requested levels above 75 db SPL he knew they'd never hear differences very well. His opinion is those who wanted 80 db SPL average couldn't hear differences blind until they were quite large in several parameters. He noted that your ear has that muscle which starts to desensitize itself for most people by 80 db. He thought this protective mechanism indicated you shouldn't expect maximum acuity at higher levels. I've had that same opinion myself.
