Does a muzzle brake really make a difference?

[grayfox]

The PRS blog and TTAG both have some good testing that show, for 30-50 MB's, how much recoil reduction/barrel rise each one has. It varies from 4% to upwards of 72%. Like I said, different designs yield different results. The APA lil B***rd and the Precision Arms M4-72 were top rated in terms of reductions. At the time of the PRS blog, the APA was, IIRC, one of the most-used MBs for top 50 PRS shooters. Me personally, both of them are a bit too much in 20" and shorter barrels, which is one of the reasons I'm using mostly the VG6 65 gamma. If you try to over-torque a brake onto the barrel (ie, not using the jam nut) you can distort the barrel harmonics but using the jam nut approach I haven't seen any of that effect, accuracy for me improves a lot with the decreased recoil.
They tested 556, 308, 6mm and 6.5 mm brakes. I like tests with objective data in them, it takes out personal biases.

https://precisionrifleblog.com/2019/02/0...uppressor/
https://precisionrifleblog.com/2015/08/2...t-results/
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/0...rake-test/