This is the anechoic chamber. One thing to notice are these wedges. These are sound-absorbing material.
They are anechoic, that means, no echoes because all the sounds are absorbed. To give you a rough idea of the Brownian Motion, that is a random air particle in space, is around minus 23dB. You can’t get any quieter because that’s just the air particles moving.
We are the edge of what is the limits of physics, in that sense. We have exercised attention to every detail, as much as we can. For any measurement we do in engineering on science, our criteria is to say “is it a meaningful measurement” and that just means, “is it valid, what you’re doing?
” It has to be repeatable. To do that, we need a highly controlled environment, so these labs are about creating a rock solid acoustically-controlled environment. When you plug in your power supply to your device, for example, it makes noise.
When you adjust the brightness of your display on your screen, it makes noise. This chamber gives us the opportunity to look for those really small signals that can have a big impact to the end user. One of the big things right now is the personal assistant, right… like Cortana, for example.
I think you will see more and more that Cortana is becoming a bigger part of your life, in general. For that to work well, audio is very, very important. Audio on the microphone side and audio on the speaker side.
I’m sure there are a lot of people trying to beat that record. Yes. Yes.
So we want to put the bar… Yes. . .
you know… We always want to have the best tools available for the job. This is what it is. It’s the best tool available.
I think, within Microsoft, it’s a tool that we can use across the company for scenarios we probably haven’t even thought about yet. It’ll take a huge effort. If it could have been done, everybody else would have been doing it.
Guinness tells us we need to reach minus 13 I think we’re going to get to minus 16. I think we’re going to beat it by 3dB. Let’s record it and let’s process the data right here.
Ok. For three minutes approximately? Yep.
Go for it. Let’s analyze that and output to the templates. Ok.
20. 6dB(A) That beats the world record. I think we did it.
You sure? Oh, I’m sure. This is fantastic!
This is great, LeSalle! This is a great accomplishment. We have best-in-class labs and best-in-class products.
Microsoft has the world’s quietest place now, officially? No doubt. Excellent.
