[danShumway]

Not to doubt you, but have you actually measured that they're moving the same amount of air?

Circulation-to-noise ratio is something that pretty much every fan manufacturer cares about; I'm a little bit skeptical that there's an innovation here that wouldn't be applied to consumer-grade fans in general; or that you wouldn't be able to find a good box fan outside of the entry-level Walmart offerings that doesn't offer the same quality for a cheaper price. The "vornado" fans seem to get recommended a lot in this area, but I don't know if they're actually moving more air or just directing it better.

Anecdotally I did look into a few fan options from purifiers that claimed to be silently moving the air, and was pretty disappointed with the specs on what I was seeing. The conclusion I drew was that increasing the size of the unit and the intake area was the best way to allow for reduced fan speed/noise/power-consumption.

But it is completely possible that there's something I missed; again I haven't done my own testing.