They say that this space can make you, like people go crazy, that's not really true, but

I think I could see why some people would not want to be in here for a long time.

I'm Dylan Therese and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's

strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we're going to a sleepy residential

street in Minneapolis to experience the Orfield Anticoic Chamber, a room inside

another room inside a concrete bunker inside a laboratory, a room once known

as the quietest room on Earth. After this.

So, I'm here at Orfield Labs. It is in one neighborhood or we end.

I was visiting Minneapolis for a month and I knew while I was there, I wanted to come

visit the Orfield Labs, which is in fact in the sewer neighborhood. It's this

unassuming IV-covered building and I've actually been to once before to experience

the world's quietest room. Technically, since I've been there, it's actually been

surpassed by another Anticoic chamber, but for a whole set of complicated reasons I'm

not going to go into, it's probably still the quietest room on the planet, or at least

it's definitely one of them. Anyway, I wanted to visit it again, but I was also interested

in the history of the space. Because for a building known for having one of the quietest

rooms on Earth, the place we're visiting today actually has an incredible acoustic history.

In the late 1960s and 70s, it housed a recording studio called Sound 80, where artists

like Bob Dylan, Kat Stevens and Prince recorded some of their most iconic work. Besides

that, it was also home to one of the first digital recording studios in the world.

They were recording Kat Stevens last American album and I said in and the recordings.

That Steve Orfield, back then Steve Orfield was working as an architecture consultant

...