While there are some well-known landmark recording studios in the United States – from Motown to Chess to Sun to RCA’s Studio B in Nashville – there’s one that feels almost hidden in the heartland, rarely getting much attention despite the fact that it was among the most consequential recording studios in the world.

The 12,000-square-foot Sound 80, opened in March 1971, was not only where Bob Dylan recorded some of his acclaimed “Blood on the Tracks” album, but is also where John Denver is said to have recorded his trademark “Sunshine On My Shoulders.” 

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Later, Cat Stevens would record parts of his “Izitso” LP, reportedly at the same time a teenage musician named Prince Rogers Nelson was holed up across the hall recording the demos that would lead to his getting signed by Warner Bros. Records.

And that’s not all. The dancefloor anthem “Funkytown,” by Lipps Inc., was also recorded at Sound 80.

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On a technical side, Sound 80 was also historic, as the first-ever multi-track digital recording studio, a fact that was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.

But that’s not the only reason the building – which has been home to Orfield Laboratories since 1990 – landed in the Guinness annals.

Thanks to its anechoic chamber, Orfield holds the title of “quietest place on Earth.”

“A lot of our practices are counter to Sound 80,” says Emma Orfield Johnston, whose grandfather Steve Orfield founded and still runs the company, which does a variety of sensory tests, typically for product testing and for architects seeking to understand the effects of lightings, thermal comfort, indoor air quality, daylighting, etc..

“We work a lot with silence.”

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As the demand for product testing has ebbed, Orfield Johnston has been branching out and working on therapeutic uses for the anechoic chamber.

For example, Orfield Johnston explains, “right now, we're working with the VA and with the University of Minnesota to do a study on silence and darkness as related to PTSD in veterans.”

That’s a big 180 from recording the St. Paul Symphony in Studio 1 or The Suburbs in Studio 2 during the Sound 80 days.

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The studio was founded in 1969 by Herb Pilhofer and Tom Jung, who had worked together at Kay Bank Studios in Minneapolis, where Wisconsin country singer Dave Dudley and Minneapolis garage rockers The Trashmen had recorded, as did an early incarnation of The Guess Who, and which later became home to Twin/Tone Records (home of The Replacements, Soul Asylum and others).

The pair hired Douglas A. Baird, Architects to to design a new studio building from the ground up on a corner site that had formerly been home to at least one house in south Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood.

The single story building they designed – along with structural engineers Meyer Borgman & Johnson, landscape architects Chas. Wood Associates and acoustical engineer Robert Hansen – was built by ALM Construction.

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The number 80, Pilhofer later recalled, "didn't mean a thing. Eighty just sounded right and it looked good."

“Pilhofer pitched the idea to Jung about starting their own studio,” notes the National Park Service, which added the studio to the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. 

“Jung insisted that he be able to hire the technical experts he wanted to staff the studio. Pilhofer agreed, saying his only criteria was: ‘to build the best damn recording studio in the world, and do it in Minneapolis’.”

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There were four tracking studios in the building, with Studio 1 being the largest. Studio 2 was considerably more intimate (and affordable for local bands) and Studios 3 and 4 were more or less small vocal, overdub, film and voiceover studios.

There were also offices, a lobby and a lounge.

“During the 1970s and early 1980s, Sound 80 was widely recognized as the top recording location in the Twin Cities, and amongst the best recording studios in the nation,” NPS says. 

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“Using the latest in acoustic engineering to design the studio spaces; investing in top recording and musical equipment; and employing technical experts in the areas of composition, recording and editing, the studio quickly gained a local and national reputation for excellence in recording.”

In 1976, the studios got a bit of an overhaul as part of a series of additions and renovations made to the building.

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By then, John Denver had already come through, according to Wisconsin native Mike Role, who is the lab manager for Orfield.

“John Denver had family in the area, and so he spent a lot of time (in the area),” Role explains, “and if you look up that song on Wikipedia, it says in the spring of this year, he was out taking a walk in one of the Minneapolis parks and wrote the song.

“‘Sunshine On My Shoulders Makes Me Happy’ came out of Studio 2.”

Another early session of note was the recording in 1976 of the self-titled LP by guitar legend Leo Kottke, who recorded a number of albums at Sound 80 over the years. R&B group The 94 East (with Prince and his best friend Andre Cymone) and punk band The Suicide Commandoes recorded there in 1977, the year Cat Stevens’ “Izitso” – recorded partly in Sound 80’s Studio 1 – was released.

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“When (Stevens) came here,” Role says, “he put down Persian rugs, he had Persian tapestries hanging from the ceiling, he was burning incense, he was a vegetarian, so he brought his own chef. He dressed the room. He wanted to put an atmosphere in the room.

“A young gentleman was in the studio (2) next door, and every now and then would poke his head in here to see how Cat Stevens conducted his business. And that was Prince. 

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“So Prince got the whole idea of, ‘okay, Cat Stevens made the room comfortable for his recording, and if you go to Paisley Park, it's done up in a way that is comfortable for Prince. I think a lot of what Prince did in his early years and just the experiences he had all ended up at Paisley. The Prince sound is obviously unique unto itself, but I think he did pick up on a lot of other things.” 

Though Prince didn’t get his first taste of recording at Sound 80, the intimate Studio 2 is where he really honed his chops on both sides of the control room glass. Here he recorded the demos that would get him a deal with Warner Bros. Records – after Prince suggested to Jung and Pilhofer that they sign him (and they didn’t) – in June 1977.

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Photographs also show Prince working on the demos in Studio 1.

Role says that once Prince worked with the engineers to get the room set up, he kicked everyone out, shut the door and did everything himself.

“He started off in Moon Studios 2,” Role says. “The guy that owned Moon Studios was also a songwriter, but he was not a musician. So he had these ideas for songs and he was watching Prince in there with two older musicians, and they were rehearsing or doing some stuff. 

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“The two older guys decided to take a break, and Prince decided to sit in the studio, and he picked up a guitar and started playing guitar, and then he sat down on the drums and started playing the drums, and then he went over to the piano, and this guy is sitting in the control room just watching this and thinking he's always had problems with bands. There's always the drummer that's late, or the guitar player that shows up drunk. He's like, ‘if I could do it with just one guy’.”

So, Prince started the demos at Moon, but then went to Sound 80 and did overdubs, cleaned up tracks and mixed. He also added vocals and some instruments to recordings by 94 East and The Lewis Conection (sic) at Sound 80 around this time.

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His deal inked with Warner Bros., the 19-year-old Prince returned to Sound 80’s Studio 1 in September 1977 to start work on his debut, “For You,” though work soon shifted to another studio.

Despite all this interesting and sometimes groundbreaking work, as the NPS notes, “the studio’s most secure income stream came from Pilhofer’s corporate clients, such as 3M, General Mills, Exxon, American Motors and Northwest Orient Airlines, for whom he composed music for advertisements.”

"The commercial stuff that paid you $2,000 for a ding-dong 30- second commercial was meaningless when you realized in the ’60s I was commissioned from the Minnesota Orchestra to write a piece for orchestra and jazz quartet, which they performed and we did a couple of times," Pilhofer told Paul Metsa for his book "Blood in the Tracks."

"I got paid $200 for that, but I am so damn proud of that activity, and I wouldn’t mention the commercial. It was a way of keeping your head oriented in the right direction. Sure, some things paid you well – but even the commercial stuff, I must say we got work for Mercedes, Audi, a lot of big-name advertisers, where we had the chance to do good quality stuff."

It was thanks to that activity that two years later, Sound 80 was launched into the international recording world limelight when St. Paul-based 3M (a Sound 80 customer) decided it needed a studio in which to install the world’s first-ever multi-track digital recording system.

Sound 80 – which had become renowned thanks not only to the talents and connections of its owners, but also for the engineering work of staffers like Scott Rivard – was selected.

3M had partnered with the BBC to create the digital system and they first installed a prototype two-track stereo set-up at Sound 80, sparking the digital recording revolution that within two years would revolutionize recording.

In June 1978, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra recorded Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Charles Ives’ “Three Places in New England” on the system and the LP became the first digital recording to win a Grammy award. 

“It was the first year at the Grammys that they had the category for digital music," Role says. "Because this was one of the first albums recorded digitally, there were no other albums recorded digitally (to compete for the award).”

With the success of digital, 3M later that year released four of its 32-track Digital Audio Master Systems across the country, including one installed at Sound 80.

“The studio was also heavily involved in the advancement of movie sound systems with Paramount Pictures,” the NRHP registration form notes, and at least one period photo, currently in the collection of Orfield Laboratories, shows what appears to be film-related work at the studio.

In 1979, producer and musician Steve Greenberg created Lipps, Inc., and singer and saxophonist Cynthia Johnson and a bevy of studio musicians recorded the “Mouth to Mouth” album in Studio 2 with engineer David Rivkin (aka David Z., a Prince collaborator, as was his brother  Bobby Z., who was the drummer in The Revolution).

The album spawned the instant dancefloor classic, “Funkytown,” which became ubiquitous in 1980 and is still heard often today.

Hometown group The Suburbs also recorded in Studio 2, which Role calls, “the money room. The big room was for Dylan and Cat Stevens and stuff like that. This is the room that the local bands could afford.” 

In 1980, Yanni recorded in that small room, too, and at some point Dave Brubeck also cut some sides at Sound 80.

Role also says that in the lower level there is a bunker-like room built to astonishing specifications that Orfield has rented over the years to local musicians.

“In the basement was Studio 5,” Role says. “We call it the lathe room. That room is about 30 inches below basement grade. So, it’s a sunken room. It's got a two-ton block of cement along one of the walls. It's got double walls all the way around with two layers of 5/8s on the inside, and two layers of 5/8s on a specially sprung ceiling. And in between the layers of gypsum on those five surfaces is a 1/16th-inch layer of lead.  

“They had a Neumann lathe down there.”

While Role isn’t sure when that room was built, because he hasn’t found it on the original plans, it appears to date to the Sound 80’s earliest days.

“Five studios – one just for film tracks,” reads a 1971 ad in Billboard magazine. “Two 16 track music studios. Mastering lab with the new Neumann VMS-70 lathe.11 ARP synthesizers. Quad mix facilities. But mostly it’s people. Producers, mixers, technicians, composers, arrangers – people who can give you the sounds and services you find in maybe three or four other recording centers.”

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In response to RCA closing its Chicago facility in 1972, Jung worked to get the word out that Sound 80 had that lathe down in the bunker.

“Jung notes that the Sound 80 Record Mastering Center is designed around the first Neumann VMS-70 computer controlled lathe ever installed in this country,” Billboard reported. “It’s tied into a transfer console of Sound 80’s own design and manufacture.”

But in the end, what most people – at least most people outside the Twin Cities – think of when they hear “Sound 80” is Bob Dylan.

The story of Dylan’s re-recording of four tracks for the acclaimed “Blood on the Tracks” album in late December 1974 has been covered in at least two books and countless articles.

But Role brings it all back home for me as we stand in Studio 1 and he cues up two versions of “Tangled Up in Blue,” one of which ended up on the album that is considered to be among Dylan’s best.

First, the version recorded with the studio cats in New York. It’s languid, dragging, without spark.

Then, the take captured in the very room in which we’re standing.

Vibrant, alive ... the keeper.

Although the musicians who recorded four songs here with Dylan for the album went uncredited for decades. These Minneapolis musicians helped make “Blood on the Tracks” what it is. To be in the room with the music playing is to be almost transported into the scene. I can almost picture house engineer Paul Martinson behind the control room window.

"The reason we hired him was that he had a lot of experience recording for film, and those are different needs and technologies,” Pilhofer told Metsa. “Paul was so polite and quiet and unassuming, people liked working with him. He was known to be a technically very knowledgeable guy.

"In this business, when you end up sitting in a room with a guy for 10 hours a day, you also look at their personality, whether you can stand him. Paul was a wonderful guy, very kind, very supportive, and he had a good ear for some things. This is a small town, so you know who works where. We were a small group; you try to find the best people in town to work with us. Paul was one of those."

Dylan, unhappy with some of the results from the New York sessions for the album, reached out to his brother David Zimmerman, who suggested Sound 80. When Dylan agreed to give it a try, Zimmerman booked the room and quietly sought a specific guitar for his brother.

As part of that process he also tapped guitar store owner Chris Weber to put together a band.

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Dylan walked through the front door with his 5-year-old son Jakob and stationed himself in a vocal booth in the corner of the studio and used Weber as a go-between to communicate with the musicians who were set up in the main room.

But, still, Dylan could tell he was in the presence of some talented guys and when they offered advice, he took it.

“One of the musicians out here during the break went up to Dylan and said, ‘Mr. Dylan, would you mind if we try changing your song a little bit?’ And he was talking about ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ And Dylan went, ‘well, what do you want to do?’

“‘Let's take it up a key, maybe a little more tempo and add some drums to it.’ And Dylan was very receptive and just went, ‘yeah, OK.’ This is what came out of this room.”

Musician Kevin Odegard – the guy with the cojones to suggest changes to Dylan – described the studio as it was at that time to Paul Metsa. 

"There are great, wonderful studio monitors inside. There’s a huge board and a vocal booth directly opposite from the mixing booth. It’s laid out perfectly so you can see everything and you can hear everything. It had state-of-the-art mics, U87s everywhere, coming out of your ears.

"Martinson knew every piece of gear, and he would say, ‘Put a U87 out here and a condenser over there for the guitars, and mic the drums this way.’ And once he was set up for the first session, we just left it that way. Nobody else, fortunately, was in there all weekend.”

The story of these sessions – they recorded on two days and Dylan returned for overdubs and mixing on a third day – is extremely interesting and if you want to know more you should check out the books “A Simple Twist of Fate,” by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard and the even more in-depth and Minneapolis-focused “Blood in the Tracks,” by Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik.

By the time “Funkytown” was topping charts around the globe, things were changing at Sound 80 and in 1981, Jung took a job in New York City.

Pilhofer closed the studio and sold the name to business manager Jan Erickson, who opened a new Sound 80 in downtown Minneapolis.

"In 1981, I decided to dissolve the company,” Pilhofer told Metsa. “There were so many things on the horizon. You could see the advent of cheap synthesizers and equipment. For $10,000 you could put up a little basement studio and put out stuff: if  you were anywhere musically inclined, that was acceptable. It was pretty good – but a lot of people don’t know the difference between pretty good and very good. By ’81, it was time to stop it. We had a great run.

"There was a point when I was getting frustrated. I was no longer the photographer working in the dark room – I was being the photographer running the business with 25 people. I had to stop that. I went back to making music."

AVC Systems ran an audio business in the Seward building during the 1980s.

“Prince made an offer on the building in 1985 and the owner's lawyers countered him and he walked,” says Emma Orfield Johnston. “And then this sat vacant – not only vacant, but unmaintained – for five years.

“Then in 1990, at the bottom of a recession, we made an offer, and ended up buying it for half of what Prince offered.”

Sound 80 is just one reason this unassuming building hiding behind the bushes in Seward has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.

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The other is due to Orfield Laboratories.

The firm, which operates its perceptual and analytical research laboratory in the old Sound 80 building, which it expanded in 1990, does product testing and other sensory-related research, such as in architecture and office design. It even consulted on the lighting for Sound 80 in this very building.

Orfield was started by the multidisciplinary Steve Orfield, whose background is so diverse you could call him something of a Renaissance man, and who says he never planned to do the kind of research and testing that goes on at the lab.

“It was all serendipitous,” he says. “It's nothing I would've expected that I would've done or even thought about.

“I was just having fun. My kids would tell their friends at school, ‘my dad just goes to work and plays, and my wife would, once a month, come to me and say, ‘what do you do, again?’”

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Although there are numerous testing spaces within Orfield, the one that has drawn the most attention is the anechoic chamber, which landed Orfield in the Guinness Book as the “quietest place on Earth.”

Built in the 1960s for Sunbeam appliances in Oak Brook, Illinois, Orfield bought it in the 1980s when Sunbeam decided to part with it. 

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“The guy that was heading the research center told his employees, ‘you have two weeks to sell everything you can on the condition that whatever you sell, we're not helping to get it out of here, and it needs to be out in two weeks’,” says Orfield Johnston. “So there were all these big companies, Motorola cell phones being one of them, that wanted to get the anechoic chamber. 

“It was basically purchased on the cheap, which was part of the flowery idea of getting it, because these are million-dollar rooms. Steve ended up going down and purchasing it. At the time my uncle was teaching at the University of Chicago, and they hired the University of Chicago football team to dismantle it, put it into three semi trucks, and then that came back to Minneapolis.”

At the time, however, Orfield had nowhere to put it, so it sat disassembled, in storage, for almost a decade. It was installed in the current building in 1997, Orfield Johnston says.

“When it was installed, we went to get our accreditation on the whole acoustic lab, and they said, 'we've never had a negative decibel claim for the anechoic chamber',” she recalls. “'We don't know of an anechoic chamber that is this quiet globally, you should go to Guinness.'

“So we did, and we actually applied to be the quietest acoustic lab in the world. And they said, ‘we'd rather just call you the quietest place on Earth.’ And we said, ‘sure, go ahead, great’.”

The room is actually multiple rooms nested inside one another.

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“Physically, there are two layers to the chamber,” Orfield Johnston explains. “We have a steel outer chamber and a steel inner chamber, which are divided by air. And our acoustic lab has foot-thick concrete walls. So we're in a room within a room within a room, and we're suspended (on a plywood board). This is airplane cable. And each one of these cables (attached to a plywood floor) can hold 1,500 pounds. So you can stand on it. 

“That's what makes this chamber unique. This is a full anechoic chamber and full anechoic chambers don't have floors. Most chambers, which are hemi-anechoic, do have floors, and they're not as quiet.”

The chamber has multiple layers of one-meter thick fiberglass wedges, and the entire thing sits on two I-beams that are each resting atop three springs.

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“So we're suspended within a room that's suspended within a room, within a room,” Orfield Johnston says.

Role says that another lab later tested quieter than Orfield, but since that time Orfield tested lower still and once again holds the Guinness title.

However, says Orfield Johnston, the demand for using the chamber for product testing has been declining.

“Our lab isn't occupied as much as it used to be,” she says. “So that also has prompted me to consider what else can we use the chamber for. 

“The general direction that we're moving in with regard to that space is we're trying to get it recognized as a therapeutic modality and as something that can be replicated and taken elsewhere.”

While some media have taken a sensationalistic approach to the anechoic chamber – “that it's a challenging place to be, that it'll drive you crazy, all these things,” Orfield Johnston says with a sigh – there is no basis for any of it, she adds.

“Up until a year ago, the anechoic chamber was a place for anecdotal responses, people telling us just how they were feeling when they came out,” she says. “Now we're interested in seriously studying the impact of silence and darkness on a variety of populations.

“Right now, the major one we're looking into is PTSD in veterans. So we're awaiting federal approval right now for what will be the first study globally on that subject.”

Thus, the chamber, which used to serve a technical purpose for industry may become a space for therapeutic use for humanity.

“Silence and darkness has been thought of on a spiritual level as a calming modality or a series of modalities, but no one actually knows what's going on as a result of it,” says Orfield Johnston. “So we'll be doing both physiological research with that to try to monitor how people are responding to their time in there, and we'll also do some research trying to understand what's going on unconsciously. 

“We think that what we can learn with the chamber we have here, we can potentially gather some of those things and bring it to people on a different scale elsewhere.”

One recent visitor to the chamber is musician Questlove, whose journey is documented in a recent article in Mpls St Paul Magazine, which is definitely worth a read, because, as Orfield Johnston says, “he has had one of the most extreme reactions I’ve ever experienced. He had a prolific experience in (the chamber).

“I think it had a lot to do with his perspective of it as a medicinal environment, which I'm very curious about.”

Orfield Johnston tells me that you can’t report on silence – and especially in combination with darkness – until you’ve experienced it, and so she sets up a chair in the center of the chamber, shows me how to turn on the light and open the door if I should feel the need, and suddenly, everything is dark and quiet.

And by quiet I mean -25db quiet. The quietest quiet on Earth.

Spoiler alert: I did not go insane (sorry, Daily Mail), nor did I have a life-changing experience like the one that led Questlove to cut loose a number of toxic people in his life.

“I’ll never be the same,” The Roots drummer told Mpls St Paul’s Steve Marsh. “I personally believe that this might be the future of the healing of mankind.”

What I did find is that the combination of the silence and darkness provided the kind of relaxing experience that I don’t have when I, for example, visit a floating tank, where the water and the low light and other sensory distractions fill my mind with thoughts.

Instead, I found that I had a sort of static in my head that started out extremely loud, but slowly tuned down until, I think (but am not entirely sure ... that's how quiet and dark it was), I fell asleep.

Afterward, I felt refreshed, and I think that like the occasional massage or the occasional plate of a dozen raw oysters or time spent alone in a hot whirlpool, a session in the anechoic chamber feels like rewarding myself, like melting away some of the accumulated stress that we all tend to carry in our flesh and bones.

While the idea of “sensory deprivation” – a term that Orfield Laboratories does not use, due to its negative connotation – is associated with things like torture, self-elected sensory deprivation can be anything but torturous.

With nothing to look at and nothing to hear – no distractions – the silence and darkness can help clear the mind or it can help focus thoughts. 

“Most everybody that goes in there just has a very relaxing time,” Orfield Johnston says. “About two and a half years ago, I started spending significant periods of time in there, and I've had a long meditation practice. 

“I have a variety of sensory processing issues that cause me to really feel deeply about the work that we do on an architectural and product consulting level. But my experience with meditation and my experience in the world is highly impacted by whatever's going on around me.”

And, Orfield Johnston says, she’s not alone.

“We find that that's true for many more people than we realize. We work with a lot of disability populations, but people don't understand how broad that is. A lot of the cognitive and perceptual issues that we're working with in design – which is everything from aging, dementia, sensory processing disorder, blindness, deafness, mental illness – when you start to add all these things up that are aside from physical disabilities, you realize it's over 50 percent of us.”

Many of the people that come to sit in the chamber come from these populations. They are looking to find silence, to find a setting for meditative practice. 

When Orfield Labs began twice weekly group sessions in the chamber, for which people buy tickets to sit with four others in the chamber for an hour, Orfield Johnston was surprised by who turned up.

“I thought at the time that it was going to be just meditators or folks maybe that recognized themselves as being in the spiritual realm that would be coming in,” she says, “and I very quickly realized that I was wrong.I had a group, for example, that was a priest, a cop, a finance guy, a mother and a sailor ... all who decided to be here, all who learned that they have much more in common than they would think. 

“The point of the experience is to allow people the opportunity to step on a perceptual level outside of the real world.” 

A bit like great music can do, in a way. And in that sense, what Orfield Laboratories is doing isn’t really the opposite of the work that Sound 80 did by capturing the beauty of music made within these same walls. The two actually dovetail quite nicely.