Microsoft Reveals The $1.5m ‘Chamber Of Silence’ & It So Quiet No One Has Been Able To Spend More Than 45 Minutes Inside

If you crave peace and quiet, it could be the ultimate destination. 

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. ‘People can’t handle it, it rattles their brains, it’s sensory deprivation.’

Gopal said the record for staying in the room, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the quietest on Earth, is short.

‘This is the quietest place on the planet, and the most someone has been able to stay in is 45 minutes.’ Just the chamber cost us $1.5m, which shows you how serious we are about audio.’

Known as an anechoic chamber, it is a small room measuring 21ft (6.36m) in each direction. It is designed to be as perfectly quiet as possible, to allow engineers to tune audio devices and sound in perfect conditions.

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.