Most unpleasant-sounding vacuum ever?

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Shop vac by Alliance/Genie, and Rigid/Home Depot with bypass motor. Emits an awful whine under load.
So our big Rigid shop vac doesn't have a bypass motor per-se. When I finally took it apart to clean it I got a surprise. There is a fan built into one layer of a three layer plastic upper housing. Dirt and water that get past the filter or float can impinge the fan and indeed it was very crudy inside, but the motor is in another layer of the upper cover driving the fan through a shaft. It is not a single one piece vacuum motor. The fan housing is molded into a layer of the upper housing.
 
Our Rigid is a smaller model, and has never been used for water. Only sawdust on the table saw.
My previous home had a big Mastercool evaporative cooler. I would suck the water out of it with the shop vac. Before that I used a hand pump and a big bucket. The fall ritual in the high desert was draining, cleaning and winterizing the swamp cooler.
 
Me, too. As a young boy it bothered me a lot, probably because I am autistic and also because as a boy my ears weren't accustomed to hearing loud sounds yet. As I grew older, my fears for loud noises gradually subsided.

~Ben
I ditto this. Since I am also on the spectrum, the noise of my household vacuums bothered me to the point that I would plug my ears before the vacuum came on. This happened with the Dirt Devil I mentioned in my OP, as well as our old Bissell CleanView 8975. Despite my obsession, I couldn't actually use a vacuum for this very reason. Not until I was in my teens did my hypersensitivity to loud noises start to subside.

However, prior to this, in my childhood apartment, I didn't mind the noise of our original Fantom Fury vacuum. This was because it was nice and quiet.

I distinctly remember a moment in the mid-2000s when my dad and I were at Fry's Electronics (remember that store?) checking out the vacuums. We were looking at hand vacs, and he accidentally turned on one of them; the sudden loudness scared the living daylights out of me.

On the subject of shop vacs; I own two of them; a Ridgid 12-gallon one (purchased in late 2007) and a Craftsman Clean n' Carry 2-gallon model (inherited from my stepmom). The Ridgid is fairly quiet, but the Craftsman is very loud (around 88 dB). I have to use hearing protection with the latter machine as a result.
 
We have a little boy who is on the spectrum and one of the things I have learned is that people on the spectrum sense the world around them differently and often more acutely than those of us who are called "neurotypical". Our little boy was always bothered by the sound of commercial toilets and hand dryers in public rest rooms. He'd cover his ears and complain about the sound. I learned from him that he and I can be in the exact same physical space but we are experiencing entirely different things. He senses things I do not sense and is bothered by things I don't even notice. It forces me to be more sensitive to his surroundings.
 
Any vacuum that Regina made had the most horrendous sound to them, and they vibrated like crazy. I think they got a deal on power saw motors and said "lets put these in a vacuum".
 

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