Chris-PA
Where the Wild Things Are
I think the sound level and all the flow characteristics of the muffler are related. Ideally you'd want a muffler that took in all the pulsations from the exhaust port and had an outlet that just emitted the average flow without any pulsations at all. There would be no flow back into the exhaust. In practice that's not really possible, especially with small can sizes. Look at what it takes to make a quiet car exhaust, which usually has multiple stages, and it still ends up restricting the flow to some extent. Also, the acoustic and filtering characteristics of the muffler are fixed, while the engine fundamental rpm changes quite a bit, so it can never really match everywhere.i find tube muffles the noise alot better than gutting.
if you are looking to get increased airflow through the carb and restrict airflow through the exhaust. my personal take is to open 2 or 3 small openings rather than 1 very big opening
Essentially the muffler is analogous to a passive low pass filter, which will always have some restriction (loss) in addition to whatever filtering it is doing.
It's possible using multiple smaller outlet holes could help block some of the lower frequency pulsations compared to a single outlet with equivalent effective area, but this will depend on a lot of other things about how the muffler is constructed. Is is a single large can or does it have other internal baffles? It might be that an internal baffle has already reduced those frequencies, and then the multiple outlet holes won't matter much. I've done both single and multiple outlets, it depends on the rest of the design.