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You think a gentle clap is pushing air around at 343 meters per second?

I dunno, unlike - apparently - you, I'm not an expert on the last few microseconds of the microfluidics of what happens to small volumes of air suddenly evacuated from a hand-sized area under constant compression.

I take it that this means your source for refutation is "Lack of imagination"?

Why would the air move 1000X faster than the hands are moving?

You don’t need air moving at the speed of sound to create noise. I can gently scratch a table surface and create noise and it’s not because of a sonic boom happening.

If I gently tap my fingers together slowly in a quiet room I can hear the sound. It’s not a sonic boom clearly. Neither is a sonic boom happening when I scratch my elbow and can hear it.

Well, not around. The sound of a clap is travelling exactly with the speed of... sound. But not one bit faster, of course.

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