Lies, damn lies and sonic toothbrushes

Feb 06, 2026 Last reply: 5 months ago 4 Replies

Full of the joys of becoming a sonic toothbrush owner I thought I compare my posh Ordo sonic toothbrush that claims 40,000 pulses a minute with my wife’s clearly inferior Philips that only manages a paltry 31,000 pulses a minute.



Oddly they both *sound* exactly the same. When I use my “spectroid” spectrum analyser app on my phone the predominant frequency for both is exactly the same, namely 264 Hz, namely 15,840 pulses a minute.



I guess this is like battery suppliers just making figures up because they know that buyers will be impressed by bigger numbers and aren’t likely to check. It seems likely to me that sonic toothbrushes are all using the same motors and frequency controlling chips. At least mine does have a significantly bigger battery that could potentially come in handy sometime.


I’m tempted to write to Ordo and ask where my missing pulses are. ;-)



Tim


My Philips sonic brush is quite fast enough for me - and splashes toothpaste and water all over the place if I'm not careful - so I wouldn't want it to go any faster.

I only charge mine once every 2 weeks - and it would last longer - so the battery is perfectly adequate for my needs.

My Phillips 4100 seems to give 256Hz and 768Hz depending on where the toothbrush is positioned relative to my phones microphone. This with an Audio Autocorrelation program on my phone (measures the frequency of a single tone)

There is also a display of the audio signal waveform When giving the 768 Hz result the waveform looks much like a sine wave at 768Hz with all peaks of equal amplitude When giving the 258 Hz result it is still sine wave looking but with one large peak amplitude and two much small peaks (repetitive). The large peaks have a period equivalent to 258Hz

The audio spectrum analyser on my phone is more positive in identifying a peak frequency of 769Hz (with 32k samples for the Fourier Transform)

My 4100 bush has two settings the second just makes a louder noise and the frequencies remain the same.

Neither frequency seems to tie in with the claim of 31,000 brush strokes (or 62,000 movements) per minute.

Both the above programs are in the phyphox app on my Android smart phone.

Demand a pro rata refund.

P.S. I assume it doesn't have different modes/settings/whatever where it might up its game to that full 40k?

All eaten by Vegans I fear...

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