Best Muzzle Brake – What The Pros Use

This article is part of a series that highlights the gear the 200 top-ranked shooters in the Precision Rifle Series (PRS) are running in long-range rifle matches. (Learn about the Precision Rifle Series.) This group of competitors represents the best precision rifle shooters in the country.

My last article shared that almost 80% of these top shooters prefer to run a muzzle brake over a suppressor. It also covered the top 2 reasons most of the pros choose a brake, along with some new products that seem to offer some of the benefits of both suppressors and brakes.

This article will break down the specific brands and models of muzzle brakes that the pros are using. Also, this year, I asked each shooter if they were using a barrel tuner, and I’ll share all of that data towards the end of this article.

Best Muzzle Brake

Let’s dive into the data! We’ll start by looking at a breakdown of what brand of muzzle brake these top shooters are using:

On the chart above, the various colors represent where a shooter landed in terms of season rank in the PRS. For example, black indicates shooters who finished in the top 10, the darkest blue is people who finished 11-25, and the lighter the blue, the further out they finished in overall standings. The chart legend itemizes the ranks each color represents, but basically, the darker the color, the higher the shooter’s overall ranking.

ACE Muzzle Brake: 32% of Pros

The ACE Muzzle Brake has become the most popular brake among these top-ranked competitors – by a fairly wide margin. 1 in 3 chose to run the ACE brake overall, and 40% of those in the top 10.

ACE stands for Austin and Clay Enterprises (ACE). Austin Orgain and Clay Blackketter have won the PRS Season Championship in 3 of the past 5 years. They clearly know what it takes to be competitive at the highest levels!

Not long ago, I interviewed Austin Orgain, and here is what he told me about the ACE brake:

Austin Orgain: “We wanted to design a brake that was effective but that didn’t direct as much blast back on the shooter. This was around the time that the APA Fat Bastard Gen 3 Brakes and other brakes with ports angled back at the shooter had become very popular, and we tried those out like everyone else. I’d say I may be slightly more blast-sensitive than some guys, but I didn’t really like using those brakes. At the end of a two-day match, I’d have pounding headaches, and it felt like someone was squeezing my head. We thought that can’t be healthy or good for your hearing, so we wanted to come up with something that kept the muzzle really flat but didn’t direct as much blast back on the shooter.

Now, if you want to strictly optimize for recoil reduction, the pure physics of ports that are angled back to the shooter are hard to beat, but that comes at a cost. And for me, that was that I would flinch. I started videoing myself, and I noticed that my eyes would close for a split second. Well, that recoil reduction was doing me no good. The recoil was reduced, but because my eyes closed for a split second, I still missed part of that bullet flight. With our brake, you don’t get near as much concussion back on the shooter, and I don’t have that finch and keep my eyes open through that first part of recoil. It’s a lot easier to pick up trace, and it’s a lot easier for your eyes to track that target in your scope through recoil and see where your bullet impacted on the target.

We also had the idea pretty early on that we wanted the brake to be ‘tuneable’ – not as in a barrel tuner, but to be able to tune out any lateral movement from recoil. So, there are index marks on the brake that allow you to turn the brake to offset any lateral recoil movement. Let’s say that you are shooting positional, and you notice that recoil is constantly moving you up and left. On most muzzle brakes, you can’t really do anything about that, but on ours, we have index lines and a set collar, and you can turn that brake so it is angled or tilted into the direction of the recoil. So if your rifle is recoiling left, you turn the brake to the left until it’s completely offset. Now, you don’t have two components of recoil happening. You’ll have a little bit of vertical movement but no horizontal movement to have to deal with. We figured the fewer planes you have of recoil, the easier it will be to spot your shot and track the target through recoil.

We tried a whole bunch of iterations and designs. We not only sat behind them and shot them, but we shot rifles with TriggerCams on them and did a lot of testing before we landed on what design was the best. We really like the end product and feel like it’s a great solution for what we wanted in a brake. So far, it seems to be a pretty popular product, and we’ve got a lot of positive feedback on it from shooters.”

Like many other designs on this list, the ACE brake features a self-timing lock nut (aka jam nut collar system), so the brake doesn’t have to be “timed” by a gunsmith for your particular barrel. That means the end user can easily switch it from one barrel to another. That is a valued feature by this crowd of shooters because most of them will burn through multiple barrels in a single year!

The street price of the ACE brake is $185 (at the time this was published).

American Precision Arms Muzzle Brake: 20% of Pros

The next most popular brand is American Precision Arms (APA), representing 20% of these pro shooters and 2 in the top 10.

APA has been one of the most used muzzle brakes among the top PRS shooters for several years. They also were one of the highest performers back when I did my muzzle brake field test, and since that time many other manufacturers have released similar designs – but APA continues to innovate.

APA has a couple of different brake models, so I asked these shooters which one they used. 90% of them said they opted for APA’s Fat B* muzzle brake, and 10% said they used the smaller APA Little B* muzzle brake. The Fat version is a little longer and features more side-ports for maximum recoil reduction.

APA’s Gen 3 design features tunable top ports that allow you to customize how much gas is directed upward to offset the muzzle rise of your rifle. The weight, balance, and overall recoil and gas pressure can vary from one rifle to another, so that allows you to tune it to the unique recoil profile of your rifle and ammo.

Street price on the APA Gen 3 Fat B* muzzle brake is typically around $150, but I noticed EuroOptic.com has them on sale right now for just $108 – making it one of the lowest-priced products used by a significant number of these top-level shooters.

Strike Without Warning Muzzle Brake: 14% of Pros

14% of these top competitors said they used a Strike Without Warning muzzle brake, including 1 in the top 10.

Strike Without Warning’s flagship design is their CHAD Tuner Muzzle Brake (TMB), which was released in 2020.

The CHAD brake is a unique design that is composed of six-piece stainless steel pieces that are CNC laser welded together into a single assembly. The manufacturer says, “Each piece has a tapered interface that aligns the assembly’s pieces perfectly, giving us industry-leading levels of run out. Due to its multi-piece design, we’re able to easily create geometry that’s otherwise impossible via conventional means. This means performance not previously seen before while maintaining shooter comfort. Designed with the use of our high-speed 50KHz impact sensor and SolidWorks flow simulations, we were able to design and refine the CHAD in ways the competition aren’t even aware of.”

The CHAD brake also features an integrated 24-position, adjustable, and locking harmonic barrel tuner.

The Strike Without Warning CHAD Tunable Muzzle Brake seems to have a lot of novel features, but they come at a cost because the Strike Without Warning CHAD TMB brake is 2-3 times more than any other brake on this list. It is priced at $515 for a raw stainless version or $545 for it finished in matte gold (aka Morgun King Edition).

Masterpiece Arms DN5 Muzzle Brake: 10% of Pros

10% of the pros were using the Masterpiece Arms DN5 Muzzle Brake, including 1 in the top 10. In fact, there were 6 using an MPA brake in the top 25, which made it the 2^nd most popular brand among shooters in the top 25 (only behind the ACE brake).

MPA makes a few different models of muzzle brakes, but all of these shooters said they were using the DN5 brake.

The DN5 is extremely effective at reducing recoil. It is actually a derivative of the “Alamo Four Star Cowl Induction Brake” design that proved to have the best performance years ago in my muzzle brake field test.

You can see the DN5 ports are more narrow on top than the bottom, which means more gas is directed upward, which offsets muzzle rise and helps you stay on target through recoil so you can spot your impacts downrange. Several shooters have reported that the MPA DN5 brake helps them stay on target more than any other brake because of how much gas it ports up. I’ve heard one pro shooter who also shooter NRL Hunter competitions with a lightweight 6.5 PRC say it is especially useful in staying on target with lightweight magnum rifles.

Street price on MPA DN5 is $199.

MDT Muzzle Brake: 9% of Pros

9% of the pros were running an MDT muzzle brake, including 1 in the top 10.

The MDT Comp 4-Port muzzle brake is specifically designed for these types of high-performance competitions. The ports look similar to APA’s design, which is very effective at recoil reduction. However, MDT says this design is a little different in how it redirects gas:

“We began with two major design parameters, to redirect, or “break up” concussion towards the shooter, a standard pain-point in muzzle brake devices, and to reduce felt recoil as much as possible. Through 16 months of development, testing, optimizing, more testing, and then even more testing, we believe that we have created the most effective competition muzzle brake on the market.” – MDT

The MDT Comp brake also features an adjustable plate on top that you can slide to allow more or less gas to be vented upward to offset muzzle rise and help you stay on target.

Street price on the MDT Comp Muzzle Brake is $250, which makes it one of the most expensive options on this list.

Area 419 Muzzle Brakes: 8% of Pros

8% of these shooters use a muzzle brake from Area 419. However,  none of those using an Area 419 brake were in the top 25, although there were 2 in the top 50.

The overwhelming majority were using the Area 419 Hellfire Match Self-Timing Muzzle Brake, but there was one shooter who said they were using the Area 419 Sidewinder Magnum Self-Timing Muzzle Brake. Both are very similar designs, but the Sidewinder is slightly larger.

From the outside, the design looks like a standard 4-port brake. But here is what Area 419 says: “This 4-port design isn’t simply stacking more of the same design on the end, it’s a complete redesign with each port being different. Different length ports, different angle ports, and different height port optimizes each one to provide an ideal function based on the pressure and volume of gas being acted on at its position. This results in optimal recoil management, optimal muzzle rise control, and imparts no extra sound pressure at the shooter position.”

Most brake designs have some type of self-timing or locking collar, but installation can be frustrating because it’s a guessing game on where you need to align the ports so that after you torque down the locking collar, they point in the correct direction. After when you tighten down a brake, it will twist a small amount. Area 419 emphatically claims to have solved that problem with their patent-pending design: “Extremely easy installation, brake WILL NOT turn as you torque the collar to lock. No more guessing where the brake ports will line up once you tighten it down!”

Area 419’s Hellfire Match brake sells for $195.

All Other Muzzle Brakes: 8% of Pros

92% of the shooters used one of the brands above, and the remaining 8% were spread over 8 different brands:

• Adaptive Tuning Systems (ATS) Tuner Brake: 2 Shooters (including #7 Jeff Guerry)
• Cortina Precision Tuner Brakes: 2 Shooters (#19 Derek Webster said he used the Cortina Precision PRS EC Tuner Brake, and #39 Justin Domaguin said he used the Cortina Precision NextGen EC Tuner Brake)
• Kahuna Muzzle Brake: 2 Shooters
• Salmon River Solutions Muzzle Brakes: 2 Shooters
• Billet Precision Rifles: 1 Shooter (including 1 in top 50)
• Insite Arms Muzzle Brake: 1 Shooter
• Brake made by “Muzzle Brakes and More”: 1 Shooter
• TorchWorks Muzzle Brake: 1 Shooter

Best Rifle Barrel Tuner

Barrel tuners have been around forever and have been very popular in the precision rimfire world, where shooters must use factory ammo and can’t “tune” a load for their rifles through reloading. But a few years ago Aaron Hipp, a veteran PRS pro shooter, introduced the Adaptive Tuning System (ATS) barrel tuner that was designed for centerfire rifles. The idea is the same as rimfire barrel tuners in that you attach a small weight at the muzzle that you can adjust in or out in very fine increments to optimize your barrel harmonics for a particular batch of ammo.

I asked these top-ranked PRS shooters if they used a barrel tuner, and here was their response to that question:

83% of these top-ranked shooters said they never use a barrel tuner. Among the top 10, 8 said no, 1 said sometimes, and 1 said yes. Among the top 25, 22 said they never use a tuner. So, the results are consistent through the ranks that 80-90% of those competing at the highest levels of the precision rifle game aren’t running a barrel tuner.

Some muzzle brakes, like those made by ATS or Cortina Precision, have an integrated tuner built into the brake. So, for some brands it’s obvious what kind of tuner they were using. However, ATS also makes a stand-alone barrel tuner that you can run alongside any muzzle brake or suppressor. So I reached out to the few shooters who said they were running a barrel tuner, and it wasn’t obvious which one it was. I got responses from all but 2 shooters. Here are the results for what brand of tuner the people who said they were using one ran:

Note: The ones that are “Unknown” are the 2 shooters that I never got a response from and couldn’t tell from their muzzle brake exactly what brand of tuner they might have been using. On next year’s survey I’ll try to ask those using a barrel tuner what model they run explicitly to prevent this going forward.

Here are links for more info on the tuners these companies offer:

• Strike Without Warning Tunable Brake “Morgun King Edition” (I provided more detail on this brake earlier in this article)
• ATS XL Competition Tuner (At least 2 shooters explicitly said they were using this as their tuner, and it is the model you can run any muzzle brake or suppressor alongside.)
• ATS Muzzle Brake with Integrated Tuner
• APA Fat Tuna (replaces the jam nut on the APA Fat B* brake)
• Cortina Precision NextGen EC Tuner Brake
• Cortina Precision PRS EC Tuner Brake

I’ll also mention that Bryan Litz and the Applied Ballistics team did the most in-depth research on barrel tuners I’ve ever seen, and the results are published in Modern Advancements in Long Range Shooting Vol III. If you like my style of writing and testing, I guarantee you’ll enjoy that book!

Coming Up Next

The next articles will cover the specific brands and models of suppressors that these top-tier competitors are using. So stay tuned for those results!

If you enjoyed this content, there is more to come! Over the next few months, I’ll be publishing a ton of data on what the top precision rifle shooters are using. Check out the other “What The Pros Use” articles that have already been published.

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