Drone manufacturers love to point out that their machines are no louder than a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner. Technically true. But anyone who has had one buzzing overhead knows the character of the sound matters as much as the decibels.
Every sound here is normalized to equal perceptual loudness using broadcast-standard LUFS leveling. Play both sounds, vote on which one you'd rather not have outside your window for an hour. Sounds compete head-to-head and earn an ELO rating — the same system used to rank chess players.
Win against a highly-rated annoying sound and your rating jumps. Lose to a quiet one and it drops fast. Over many votes, the ranking reveals which sounds people genuinely find more annoying at equal volume.
Because this poll is the kind of thing certain industries might want to skew, every vote passes through multiple checks: invisible bot detection (Cloudflare Turnstile), per-IP rate limits, cryptographic pair tokens to prevent replay, a mandatory "both sounds played" requirement, and session bias detection. Suspicious votes are logged but excluded from the leaderboard.
A simple vote count would let common sounds dominate by appearing more often. ELO compares relative annoyance — a sound that consistently beats other annoying sounds ranks higher than one that only beats quiet ones, regardless of how many votes it has received.
You'll see every possible pair (105 with 15 sounds) before any repeats in a session. Within that, drone is shown more often than other sounds because it's the focal question this site was built around. This affects how quickly drone's rating settles — it doesn't affect its position. ELO compares head-to-head outcomes, so frequency of appearance doesn't tilt the result.
Which sound appears on the left or right is randomized each time to remove position bias.
When a new sound is added, it starts at the middle of the pack and is marked new until it has collected enough votes to settle. During this provisional period its rating moves twice as fast — the same approach used by chess.com for new players. Don't read too much into a new sound's rank until it loses the badge.