Loudest Sounds Ever

I was researching some articles about sound safety (great NY Times educators page to start you off here) and I stumbled upon this great interactive infographic about the loudest sounds.  It was created by an air conditioning company of all things, as part of their research into exactly how loud their products were compared to other things. As they say in the explanation, they might have traveled down a bit of a rabbit hole:

So we started to delve into the dark world of decibels to make the blinking things easier to understand. We initially wanted to create an amazingly informative infographic to best explain how loud our air conditioners are. However, we didn’t know where the ‘cut-off’ point should have been and we got somewhat carried away until we found the worlds loudest noise!