Quietest place on Earth at their headquarters in Redmond Washington, USA. In an effort to demonstrate their commitment to unrivaled research – and silence their competitors – Microsoft has created theat their headquarters in Redmond Washington, USA. 
 
 The computer company has built an anechoic chamber in which highly sensitive tests reported an average background noise reading of an unimaginably quiet -20.35 dBA (decibels A-weighted). 
 
 An anechoic chamber is a room insulated from exterior sources of noise and designed to completely absorb reflections of sounds inside. 
 
 
 
 Two tests were carried out by professional independent sound specialists and the test results were 20.6 dBA and -20.1 dBA – a considerably better figure than the creators’ hope for -16 dBA. 
 
 
 
 Above: Sound-absorbing wedges inside the chamber. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Microsoft wanted to build an incomparably silent place to use for audio and device testing and the company has proved itself by significantly bettering the record of -13 dBA which was recorded at the Anechoic Test Chamber at Orfield Laboratories, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA in October 2012. 
 
 The comparatively huge improvements to the record benchmark reflects how much noise isolation technology has improved in recent times, with the record first set in 2004 at only -9.4 dBA. 
 
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 To find out more about the attempt, visit news.microsoft.com/stories/building87/audio-lab.php 
 
 Could your company use a Guinness World Records title attempt to launch a new product and raise brand awareness? Visit our Business Solutions section to find out how we can help your brand be the biggest and boldest - or get in touch today. ||||| Microsoft claimed an unusual title earlier this month: It set the Guinness World Record for the “Quietest place on earth,” according to that authority responsible for awarding the superlatives. 
 
 At its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., the company built a room so sound-proof that it not only blocks out noise on the outside, but also muffles sound on the inside. As a result, the room shattered the previous record for silence: Its average background noise only comes out to -20.35 decibels—or “unimaginably quiet,” Guinness said. 
 
 On its website about the project, Microsoft (MSFT) demonstrates its record-setting technology with a glimpse into the place it calls “Where sound goes to die.” 
 
 The company plans to use the room, officially known as an “anechoic chamber,” to test its hardware and audio technology. The chamber features absorbent wedges built into its walls and “a mannequin that rapid fires questions to Cortana while sound engineers try to stump her with a variety of canned background noises.” 
 
 Microsoft’s slogan accompanying the project: “Where precision is paramount, every decibel counts.”
– Guinness World Records has officially ruled: an audio lab at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is the quietest place in the world. Though Building 87 on the Microsoft campus is home to three anechoic, or "free from echo," chambers the company uses to test audio technology, the largest is "unimaginably quiet," testers say, per Science Alert. It helps that the room is covered in "wedges" made of sound-proofed material and built on springs to cut down on vibrations. But how exactly do you decide which is the quietest place on the planet? It comes down to a sound measurement. The silence inside the chamber measures -20.6 dbA (decibels A-weighted), compared to -13 recorded at the Anechoic Test Chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis back in 2012. A second test in the chamber—which Microsoft calls the place "where sound goes to die," per Fortune—returned a slightly less impressive -20.1 reading, but both results surpassed even the expectations of Microsoft, which had expected about -16, according to Guinness. So what does -20.6 dbA sound like? Humans can't actually hear anything below zero decibels, but "to give you a rough idea, the Brownian motion—that is, a random air particle in space—is around -23 dBA. You can't get any quieter because that's just the air particles moving," an Microsoft engineer explains in a video. "We are on the edge of what [are] the limits of physics." Thinking Building 87 would be a great place to take a nap? Sadly, you're probably out of luck. Engineers are busy using its anechoic chambers to train the Cortana digital assistant to better handle audio inputs and outputs. (Listen closely, and you can hear California's drought.)