
The Quietest Place on Earth - adammichaelc
http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20121022-the-quietest-place-on-earth
======
ColinWright
I can't confirm that these are the same, because I can't access this site.
However, I suspect that this is the same as has been reported from many
source, and submitted many times. For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3798283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3798283)
The World's Quietest Room: Nobody Has Lasted More Than 45 Minutes In It
(dailymail.co.uk)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781040)
The Quietest Room in the World (tcbmag.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783478)
The quietest room in the world (tcbmag.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802268)
Quietest place on earth messes with the head. (yahoo.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821238)
The quietest place on earth (neatorama.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053296)
A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it (timesherald.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4219266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4219266)
This Is The Quietest Place On Earth (bitrebels.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4565325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4565325)
World’s Quietest Place Lets You Hear Your Internal Organs (odditycentral.com)

~~~
kr4
Any idea as to how much does it take to build such a chamber (with decibels in
minus)?

~~~
icpmacdo
I wonder if an isolation tanks decibels are in the minus? You can build one
yourself for a few thousand dollars.

------
read

      "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a
       quiet room alone."
    
      - Blaise Pascal

------
ghshephard
Why would Companies use a chamber with a background noise of -9.4 dB to "to
test the sound levels of products, such as washing machines, refrigerators and
Harley Davidson motorcycles."

I would think any half decent noise chamber would do the job.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I would guess management wants the prestige of using the best facility
possible, and the engineers wanted a chance to use the room.

------
angersock
Oh wow, and here I was thinking it would be a tie between the Google and
Facebook customer service centers.

------
pontifier
there is a chamber like this at my local university that I have been in a
couple of times. its very strange to talk or hear others talk. your voice just
feels weak. even when you yell the sound just stops... yet, ears seem to
adjust the percieved loudness of things relative to the background, and in a
chamber like this you ask your ears to divide by zero, and sometimes it feels
like even the silence is louder than anything you have ever heard.

------
jpswade
[http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130607104502/http://www.bbc...](http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130607104502/http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20121022-the-
quietest-place-on-earth)

------
drakaal
I am guessing someone who is deaf could win at the challenge.

I have spent time in Anechoic chambers for doing noise level and vibration
testing on equipment. They are disconcerting for sure, but I have to imagine
someone who never hears anything would not be disoriented.

The shape of the walls messes with me I think more than the sound. We aren't
used to not having flat surfaces to judge distance against and not having
anything that is only "one" distance away definitely works the part of the
brain that does depth perception.

------
kr4
As per Wikipedia [0], The Acoustics Department at University of Salford has a
number of Anechoic chambers, of which one is unofficially the quietest in the
world with a measurement of −12.4 dBA.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber)

------
mixedbit
I propose a vacuum chamber as a better candidate for the title of the quietest
place on earth.

------
iamben
Can someone summarise? Once again, as a Brit I'm unable to access content from
BBC.com.

Thanks :-)

~~~
delinka
Some choice quotes that sum it up nicely:

"The anechoic (meaning echo-free) chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota absorbs
99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records."

"While a human can normally hear sounds as low as zero decibels (an average
conversation runs at about 30 decibels), the background noise in the anechoic
chamber has been measured at -9.4 decibels."

"Companies use the chamber to test the sound levels of products, such as
washing machines, refrigerators and Harley Davidson motorcycles. NASA uses a
similar chamber to perform stress tests on astronauts."

~~~
iamben
Thanks guys.

Still baffled as to why the beeb IP restrict this. I can acknowledge it's part
of BBC Worldwide, and therefore not covered in the licence fee, but what harm
it would do to let Britain have the same access as _the rest of the non
licence paying world_ is beyond me.

~~~
amirmc
from the BBC faq:

 _We have an unusual requirement when it comes to developing the BBC website -
it carries advertising internationally but not in the UK, and we have to build
and design for both these situations simultaneously. The site carries
advertising internationally so that UK licence fee payers don 't cover
international costs. Some content on the site is available in the UK but not
internationally - notably certain rights restricted video. Up to now we have
had: A UK edition without ads, A UK edition with ads, an international edition
with ads and an international edition without ads, all in addition to some
content which is visible in the UK but not internationally. Managing all those
combinations within our existing design framework had become impractical as
well as expensive and, critically, had started to affect our ability to find
the best ways of developing the site in the future._

via
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/website_changes](http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/website_changes)

There's more info there about how they do it (GeoIP) and some known issues.

~~~
iamben
Interesting, thanks. It's still incredibly annoying. If you can block me based
on my IP, just use the same technology and don't serve me the ads.

------
cellover
Beyond hearing your own heartbeat after a while, an ultimate psycho-acoustic
experiment: hearing air molecules hit your eardrums.

Taken from Master Handbook of Acoustics 5th edition (page 39-40): The human
ear cannot detect sounds softer than the motion of air particles on the
eardrum. This is the threshold of hearing. There would be no reason to have
ears more sensitive, because any lower-level sound would be drowned by the
air-particle noise. This means that the ultimate sensitivity of our hearing
just matches the softest sounds possible in an air medium.

~~~
kaoD
There must be a subtle detail I'm missing. Isn't "air molecules hitting our
eardrums" essentially hearing?

~~~
wglb
Probably _softer than the motion of air particles on the eardrum_ means the
lowest-level brownian motion of air molecules in the absence of sound.

------
DanBC
Wait, is the 45 minute thing true?

Is there any way I can volunteer for an attempt?

~~~
nacs
From [http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20121022-the-quietest-
place-o...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20121022-the-quietest-place-on-
earth) :

"Group tours of the labs are available a few times a year and include a brief
stop at the anechoic chamber (call the lab for details). But the facility has
had so much interest in the 45-minute challenge that the founder Steven
Orfield is considering making that option available to the public within the
next year, and is working with the Guinness Book of World Records to establish
an official record for the longest time spent in an anechoic chamber."

~~~
DanBC
I'd be interested to see what some meditating monks could do.

(Thanks for the quote. I'm in the UK and the page is, frustratingly, blocked
to us.)

------
majkelo
We have exactly the same room in our Physisc Department, in Poznan, Poland. We
call it "noecho room".
[http://www.ia.amu.edu.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=a...](http://www.ia.amu.edu.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=9)
Greeting from PL! (:

------
sb23
I'm envious of those who could hear their own heart beat. I suffer from
tinnitus, and when things get quiet all I hear is a thin high pitched ringing
noise.

------
nabla9
I don't understand the challenge part. Why don't people with bad hearing go
nuts in normal quiet rooms if not hearing anything is so challenging?

~~~
taybin
I think the problem is that you _can_ hear yourself think, so to speak.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
>won't come cheap

>$300-$400/hour

That doesn't sound too bad actually, I expected an order of magnitude more.

------
stinos
"-9.4 decibels"

erm, decibel _what_ exactly? Decibel is a ratio between two values. If you
don't state the one compared with, you're talking pretty much nonsense.

~~~
ghshephard
Not sure who downvoted you, as you correct.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel)

Possible units (dropped by the article):

    
    
      dB SPL
      dB SIL
      dB SWL
      dB(A), dB(B), and dB(C)
      dB HL
      dB HL

~~~
stinos
Yeah should have included the link maybe. Possibly also lots of people don't
know any better since 90% or more of the time the media reports about audio
levels it's always plain 'decibel'. Even though that makes no sense
whatsoever. It's like saying 'and now drive 1' without specifying a unit. Yet,
I would have expected more from the average HN user with anough karma to
downvote.

