This six-sided anechoic chamber, located at Orfield Labs in Minnesota, holds a spot in the Guinness World Records as the quietest place in the world. In fact, it’s so quiet that overall the silence of the room, coupled with the sounds of your inner organs, is enough to send the toughest characters running towards the exit.

How does one achieve The Quietest Place on Earth? Start with a room within a room, within a room: the Orfield Labs six sided anechoic chamber is a small room floating in a pit on I-beams that are on top of springs. A five sided chamber of identical construction surrounds it on the edge of the pit. Both chambers are made of double wall steel-insulation-steel. The anechoic chamber was manufactured by Eckel, the largest anechoic chamber builder in the country.

Both steel chambers are held within a larger room that was built with solid one foot thick concrete walls and ceiling panels. The smaller room is filled with 3.3 feet thick fiberglass acoustic wedges. This approach led to the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Labs being measured by engineers on January 21st of 2004 at negative 9.4 dB (with A-weighting), thus earning it the title of Quietest Place on Earth. By comparison, the low threshold for human hearing is considered to be 0 dB.

[via Audio Junkies]