How an unused nuclear power plant became home to a world-class acoustics lab
1 min read
Summary
Satsop Business Park, an hour and a half outside Seattle, contains the abandoned Washington Nuclear Projects 3 and 5 (WNP-3 and WNP-5) cooling towers.
These structures have been repurposed as a unique testing facility for NWAA Labs, which specializes in acoustics testing.
Led by former NASA scientist Ron Sauro, the company is equipped with an anechoic chamber that is allegedly the quietest room of its kind in the world.
NWAA Labs tests soundproofing materials, sound emissions, and sound transmission loss, the latter of which requires two reverberation chambers with a 12-by-10-ft opening between them.
Also on site is a free field speaker testing rig, which is a tall structure with an arm that curves forward over a pedestal and is covered in a kind of white insulation.
When testing, a speaker is placed on the pedestal and rotated while playing sound, which provides data that gives a three-dimensional picture of the speaker’s performance.