An Interview with Kyle Lynch of Riflespeed [GunCon 2025]

Every time I read an article about how a lever or straight-pull bolt gun is "way better than an AR" because it's so quiet suppressed, I think of how an adjustable gas block gives an AR the option of being either:

A. exactly as quiet suppressed as any manual gun with the gas turned off, or

B. semiautomatic, and therefore better in other respects than a manual gun

Can a Riflespeed be tuned for that? Maybe, through experimentation, and then you still don't know (without more experimentation) if it's going to be off for other loads. If you do tune it to where your fired brass is in the chamber after firing, are you sure the gas is off, or maybe the case was extracted 3/4 of the way and rammed back into the chamber (which isn't quite as quiet, and leaves the possibility of a stuck case).

You wrote "the need for what you call (unambiguously off) is not clear to me in any scenario." I'd ask the converse question: if every other device you own (adjustable or otherwise) has a clear Off setting with zero need for experimentation, for very obvious reasons, what possible reason could you have for wanting something ambiguous? And why not cut swapping plungers [a ridiculously tiny, easily lost part] out of the equation?

It would be one thing if an "off" setting added complexity, but it's actually simpler. The GB is basically a stop valve, and a stop valve is "off" when the plug / plunger is fully seated. Every $3 spigot at Lowes offers that; why not here?

No "counting endless click adjustments", either. Every valve offers a range of adjustment from closed to fully open (i.e. where flow is limited by the rest of the system), and that range is very small for an AR because gas ports are so small. Find out the setting for the biggest port and cut the cam to adjust from fully closed to that in one rotation. Put a stud on the dial so it's tactile and readily visually apparent (I had to do that because of the way my PDW is set up).

Repetitively explaining plunger function doesn't really answer the question of why require rinkydink part swapping at all. Telling me something "isn't for me" doesn't answer why making it suit everybody (at no added cost) wouldn't be better.

Repeating your claim about counting lots of clicks after I wrote "No "counting endless click adjustments"," is just disingenuous. Point out where I suggested needing a tool. Does anyone put a stud (on an LPVO dial, for example) to make it harder to adjust without tools, or the exact opposite (adding both physical leverage and easy visual position indication)? It wouldn't eliminate the ability to select a number; it would make it clear which "o'clock" you're on without even looking at the number.