Every tyre sold here carries a label with three ratings on it, and the one nobody reads is the noise figure. It is a measurement in decibels taken as the tyre rolls past a microphone, and across tyres of the same size the spread is only a few points. Decibels are a logarithmic scale, so a few points is a bigger difference in what you hear than the numbers make it look.
What you hear is not one sound either. There is a low drone from tread blocks striking the road in sequence, which is why designers vary the block sizes around a tyre instead of repeating one pattern. There is a hiss from air pumped in and out of the grooves. And there is road roar, the coarse surface exciting the whole carcass and arriving in the cabin through the suspension.
So the figure earns its place if the car is quiet and you spend real time at speed. If your driving is short and full of junctions it will make almost no difference, and the attention belongs on wet grip instead.
Most people put new tyres off because of the afternoon it costs them, not because of the tyre. A run on Peckham High Street and an hour at a counter is a morning gone. A Queens Road cul-de-sac or a Nunhead main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in Nunhead or a narrow bay on Rye Lane is usually workable.
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Driving in Peckham is mostly short, slow and full of junctions, which is the one situation where tyre noise barely registers. If your week is the school run and the market end of Rye Lane, buy for wet grip and ignore the decibels. If you get out of town regularly, the figure is worth ten seconds before you commit.
A driver covering long distances asked for the quietest option in the size rather than the grippiest. We compared the label figures for three tyres in the same fitment, then fitted the set on a driveway near Nunhead.
A car on Bellenden Road had gone noticeably louder after new rubber went on elsewhere. The tyres were the right ones and correctly balanced. The sound was a wheel bearing, which is not something a tyre will ever fix.
Fitting two quiet tyres to the front and leaving two noisier ones behind gets you the noisier pair anyway. A car off Queens Road had all four changed at the kerb once the owner had heard that.
Not as a rule any more. It was once a genuine trade off and on aggressive patterns it still is, but a good modern tyre scores well on noise and wet grip together. The trade off survives at the budget end.
Less than the label suggests, because the surface matters more than the tyre. A quiet tyre on coarse tarmac is still louder than a noisy one on smooth new tarmac. What you get is a few decibels off everything, most noticeable on a long steady run.
Wet grip, for almost everybody. Fuel efficiency next if you cover real mileage. Noise after that, unless the car is quiet enough that you notice it. The letters are graded bands rather than fine measurements, so one band apart is a smaller gap than it looks.
No. Buy in pairs across an axle at the very least, so the two tyres doing the same job behave the same way. Four at once is tidier and means everything wears out together next time, but a good pair on the driven axle is sensible.
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