the credibility document
Before we publish a single figure for our own paddles, here is exactly what we will measure, how, and under what conditions, so you can hold us to it.
When a ball meets a face, the paddle rings like a struck plate. Everything you hear, and much of what you feel, reduces to two measurable quantities.
The pitch of the impact, in hertz. It is set by the stiffness, mass and geometry of the face-and-core system: stiffer and lighter rings higher; softer and heavier rings lower. A higher frequency reads as a sharper, brighter crack; a lower one as a duller, rounder tap.
Frequency also carries: higher pitches cut through ambient noise and travel further past the fence line. It is the main reason paddle noise complaints exist.
Pitch is feedback. A consistent, known frequency means the paddle tells you the same thing about every strike. Mishits sound different from pure ones, and you learn faster.
How long the sound lasts, measured as the time the impact takes to fall to a defined fraction of its peak. A long decay is a ring-out: the paddle keeps vibrating after the ball has gone. A short decay is a clean stop.
Decay is decided mostly by damping: the core material, the bond layers, and the edge and throat construction. Two paddles at the same frequency can sound completely different if one rings twice as long.
Decay is the "buzz". Long decay is felt in the hand as lingering vibration; short decay feels settled and quiet. It also determines how intrusive a paddle is to everyone else.
These figures are not ours. They are the industry-typical and published criteria the category is discussed against, and the scale our own results will be read on.
Attribution matters. The two reference entries above describe the published landscape, not our products. We will never present a category figure as if it were a measurement of a BainPower paddle, in either direction.
the anechoic cell, where the figure gets settled
A phone recording on a windy court is not a measurement. A defensible acoustic figure needs three things: a controlled room, a repeatable strike, and a calibrated ear.
Testing happens in an anechoic or acoustically controlled chamber, where reflections and background noise are removed or characterised. Outdoors, wind, echoes off fencing and neighbouring play contaminate every reading. In a cell, the only thing the microphone hears is the paddle.
The paddle is excited the same way every time: a fixed impact energy at a fixed location on the face, using a mechanism rather than a human arm. Humans cannot swing identically twice; a rig can. Strike location matters too, because a paddle rings differently at its centre than at its edge, so the strike point is fixed and recorded.
The microphone is a measurement-grade instrument, calibrated against a reference source before the session, placed at a fixed, documented distance and angle. Sound level falls with distance, so an uncontrolled mic position makes loudness figures meaningless. Calibration makes readings comparable between sessions, and between labs.
From each strike we extract the dominant frequency and the decay time: how long the signal takes to fall to a defined fraction of its peak. The analysis window, weighting and thresholds are documented, so anyone with the raw recordings can reproduce the numbers.
A single unit tells you about that unit. We will test multiple production units per SKU with multiple strikes per unit, and publish the sample size alongside the result. A figure without a sample size is an anecdote with confidence.
Plainly: BainPower has not completed cell testing on any of its own SKUs. Not BAM, not TAP, not TAP Slim. Every acoustic field on this site is empty because the test has not been run, not because the result is being withheld.
We could have shipped this site with plausible numbers. Most of the category does. We publish the method first and the figures second, because a measurement you announce before you take it is the only kind you can't quietly revise.
This page is the commitment. When cell testing is complete, the results will be published here: frequency, decay, conditions and sample size, for every SKU, whatever the numbers turn out to be. If a result is unflattering, it goes up anyway.
We will publish the cell-test figures here when they are done, and what they said.
Meanwhile, the paddles
BainPower