Inside the quietest room in the world: Microsoft reveals the $1.5m ‘chamber of silence’

UK Daily Mail ^ | Mark Prigg

[BenLurkin]

The record-breaking room is used by the tech giant to do everything from tuning its headphones to making your mouse clicks sound perfect.

However, the firm has found is it too quiet for most people - and nobody has been able to spend more than 45 minutes inside.

The few outsiders who have entered it have complained of everything from becoming disturbed by the loudness of their own breathing to ringing in the ears and deafening stomach gurgles.

‘Some people come in for a minute and want out immediately,’ Hundraj Gopal, Microsoft’s principal human factors engineer, and the man who led the team that built the anechoic chamber, told Dailymail.com.

Known as an anechoic chamber, it is a small room measuring 21ft (6.36m) in each direction.

The chamber is within six concrete layers, each up to 12 inches thick, that help to block out sounds from the outside world.

The walls, floor and ceiling are covered in giant wedges of fiberglass foam to eradicate any echoes.

The chamber floats on 68 vibration damping springs and is mounted on its own separate foundation slab to cut it off from the rest of the building.

Inside the chamber, the floor is made from the same steel cables used to stop fighter jets as they land on aircraft carriers, arranged like a net above the foam wedges underneath.

‘This chamber blocks 120db, so if you had a jet engine taking off just outside, you would barely hear it,’ said Gopal

[BobL]

“...they ended up shouting at each other because they couldn’t hear what the other was saying.”

Yea, the damn thing never worked right. Other times the ‘stop’ function didn’t work, and it crushed their desk.

But what the heck, it was a low-budget TV show.