My father Paul L. Michael started testing hearing protectors in the early 1970s, mostly operating out of Moore Building on the PSU campus. On occasion, he ran some experiments in an anechoic chamber in the basement of Osmond Lab. We once visited the chamber in Osmond and a grad student was living there. Later we went to check out the chamber for a project and the Chemistry department had disassembled the chamber and thrown it away, replacing it with an optics lab. So much for using university facilities. I took over the testing business in 1990 as we moved out of Moore Building. For a couple of years I ran the lab business from semi-reverberent chambers built at my residence, then I bought an IAC booth and had it installed at the small business incubator in the PSU Research Park. After 5 years, I moved to an underground location in an industrial park in State College. It is very quiet and it's a perfect location for our testing. We recently built a second larger booth at our lab that can be used for REAT testing, and also for Modified Rhyme Tests (MRT).

We can generate up to about 120 dBA continuous in the booth for tests requiring high SPL. We have an impulse noise facility that is about 20 x 60 feet of test space with minimal reflections. For the impulse tests, we use a shock tube built by Mark Cauble of BC Precision Tool in Cincinnati, and we use the GRAS 45CB test fixture that meets ANSI S12.42-2010. We're using Viacoustics Trident software with the Viacoustics Impulse Peak Insertion Loss Analysis (IPILA) package.