"Sound" is due to something moving slower than, well, the speed of sound. "Shock waves" travel faster than that. Really Big explosions can create shock waves that move faster than sound for a long way, but your firecracker examples are just the usual form of sound-based noise. The _sound_ of the explosion is propagated by the motion of the atoms due to their thermal energy. One way to see this: Far from the firecracker, the energy of the explosion has not increased the energy of the air molecules at all: their mechanism for transporting sound energy isn't about the firecracker at all.