Mechanical Keyboard Sounds – A listening Museum
sheets.works

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139 points

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akashwadhwani35

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5 days ago

43 comments

al_borland ・ 8 hours ago

I read the note at the bottom about the recordings coming from the community, but I think that variation limits the value significantly.

The Cherry Blue vs Cherry Blue (Full Travel) for example. I would expect the full travel to be louder, the normal sound plus the bottom out, but it seems quieter and more generic. The Cherry Browns were the same way.

Having recordings where there is a lot of control around the recording (same room, mic, distance, levels, etc) and the only variable is the keyboard, would be much more interesting. As it stands, I don’t feel like it’s giving me a true representation that I can use. I’m sure some are, but if I haven’t used a particular keyboard before, I can’t be a good judge of if the sound is accurate or not.

  • aalzi ・ 7 hours ago

    > (same room, mic, distance, levels, etc) and the only variable is the keyboard, would be much more interesting

    can't agree more with this.

    I have the novelkey creams for example, and they sound nothing like in the sound representation.

    People forget how much the plate, material of the keyboard etc vary the sound.

SparkyMcUnicorn ・ 8 hours ago

On every keyboard I get, I swap the switches out for silent tactiles[0][1] that I've selected through trial and error. Quiet is really nice (my mouse clicks are louder), but the way they feel is fantastic.

I wish there was a brick and mortar that let you try out a good range of these switches. Places like microcenter have the popular standard choices, but there's so many other switches out there that are just worlds different.

[0] standard preference: https://a.co/d/03j6Boy0

[1] low profile preference: https://a.co/d/06yVB6jg

  • akashwadhwani35 ・ 6 hours ago

    yeah silent tactiles are a gap, the tactile section is all loud stuff (pandas, banana split), nothing quiet. boba u4 should be on there, adding next round.

    brick and mortar thing is real. microcenter's basically it for physical. novelkeys and kbdfans sell $8 switch tester packs with ~10 switches each, not a store but at least you feel them before committing.

  • eviks ・ 7 hours ago

    Yes, silence should be the default

joelkoen ・ 8 hours ago

Looks like a cool website, but after I test a few different keyboards it prompts me to subscribe. After pressing 'maybe later', it comes back again and again, only letting me test three different keyboards before bugging me again. Completely unusable.

  • gblargg ・ 5 hours ago

    I couldn't even get the X box to work to close a particular keyboard and then select another. One time it worked but I couldn't tap on any other keyboards and I had to reload the page to be able to select another one.

    EDIT: now it's working, don't know why it repeatedly wasn't.

  • utopcell ・ 7 hours ago

    "Completely unusable" is an over-exaggeration. By default, assume good will.

phantomathkg ・ 9 hours ago

The UX of the website is kind of horrible. After a few clicks it prompted to subscribe. I understand it takes time to build the thing up, but the disruption is huge.

  • ares623 ・ 8 hours ago

    Why do they want my email though? Well, I can guess why. But why would some random email be useful for such a site?

    • akashwadhwani35 ・ 8 hours ago

      Building a newsletter, so I can keep sending cool pieces to your inbox

      • pawsocks ・ 7 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Everybody hates this and you know it, worsening the experience of real people for an absurdly small chance of personal profit

negura ・ 2 hours ago

i've wasted 2 weeks of my adult life on diy mechanical keyboards.. i did build one in the end. unless you're in desperate need of a recreational hobby, i'd not advise anyone to get into it. i'm convinced the whole thing is manchild territory

  • bartread ・ 2 hours ago

    I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "manchild" territory: hobbies are fine, and if your hobby is DIY mechanical keyboards, more power to you.

    Where I start to break out the scepticism is when people start talking about how much more productive they are because of their fancy keyboard, or how important exactly the right keyboard is to productivity.

    That's mostly nonsense.

    I've got valuable work done in a whole variety of more and less ideal/noisy/comfortable/uncomfortable environments on a 13 inch laptop using its built-in keyboard.

    The primary driver that makes you productive or non-productive is your motivation. If you want to get it done you'll get it done. To a very large extent, everything else is incremental. Multiple monitors, fancy keyboard, cool mouse, ergonomic chair, whatever. They're nice, and they do help a bit. But, fundamentally, what really gets things over the line is desire, motivation.

    Whereas a lot of this work adjacent stuff is a form of procrastination.

    I've gone through a similar experience with musical instruments and studio gear, versus actual music creation. At some point you just have to stop tinkering and start making music, and what I've realised is that the only item I have available to me at almost all times to do that is my laptop, so maybe I should focus on working in the box instead of on acquiring more hardware.

nowami ・ 4 hours ago

Love this. Small suggestion for mobile UX: either hide the system keyboard, or allow the user to hear the currently selected typewriter sounds for their system keyboard taps. Not sure this is intended behaviour, but typing on mobile gives a generic click unless I use the poky on-page keyboard and thus lose the muscle memory needed to type quickly or accurately.

Also navigating back in mobile browser should close the active keyboard as on a small screen it looks like you are on a new page so it's surprising when back throws you out of the site.

  • akashwadhwani35 ・ 3 hours ago

    Fixed it, the iOS was cutting the audio pack

marius_ ・ 18 minutes ago

As a software developer, I absolutely despise loud keyboard sounds that I didn’t produce myself. In an office setting, fast typists with loud mechanical keyboards are the absolute worst (thank God for AirPods)!

utopcell ・ 6 hours ago

Someone should add a grid of mics and speakers inside a keyboard to record impulse responses for different kinds of keys. In this way, one can first do noise cancellation for the currently used keys, and then apply an IR to make the keyboard sound like another one.

psidebot ・ 7 hours ago

I wish you could play it without typing. I can't hear it over my Cherry MX browns.

tripdout ・ 9 hours ago

As someone who doesn't pay much attention to the world of mechanical keyboards, very happy that I can use "thock" as a filter.

EDIT: A quick Google shows it's a pretty popular term, so I guess that's how I even know about it, the only other mechanical keyboard term in my vocabulary being "Cherry MX Blue clicky switches" for the ones on my AliExpress mechanical keyboard that prevent me from using the keyboard around other people. Unfortunately it also makes it difficult to hear the keyboard sounds without clicking on the letters instead :(

  • akashwadhwani35 ・ 7 hours ago

    Thock is a filter if you type in the bar, and adding "Play sample" button, didn't think of it, but a good idea!

chromadon ・ 4 hours ago

My wife has been showing a little bit of interest in a “proper” keyboard for working from home.

I’m going to show her this and see if she likes any of them.

  • akashwadhwani35 ・ 3 hours ago

    Go for it, and please let me know what she decides

golem14 ・ 8 hours ago

Hmmm. Someone tell the mynoise people. Having a sound ambience of a typing room might be awesome ? Or not ?

The Selectric sounds pretty nice. I should really modify one of mine to be used as a terminal one day.

  • zimpenfish ・ 3 hours ago

    On the old[0] MyNoise app, there's "Calm Office" which has generators for "Keyboards & Mouse"[1] and "Keyboards"[2].

    There's also "Vintage Office" which has "Mechanical Keyboard"[3].

    Both have a variety of other ambiences that could fill out "typing room" (especially if you made a multi-generator.)

    But yeah, it could do with a bit more variety of "office" and "keyboard" generators.

    [0] I dislike the new app's UI/UX, it doesn't support multi-generators, and there's no easy way to download all the generators you have access to. (You also have to pay again for lifetime access but that I'm fine with.)

    [1] "thock"

    [2] "clatter"

    [3] kind of a watery thock?

  • userbinator ・ 7 hours ago

    Tons of ten-hour-long typing sound videos on YouTube.

m463 ・ 9 hours ago

I always bought the non-clicky keyboards...

ilovefrog ・ 9 hours ago

i like the sound when im pressing the buttons but i can't stand listening to them in a recording its horrible

  • thenthenthen ・ 8 hours ago

    I made (read: assembled) a lot of keyboards and tuned the sound to my liking, sometimes i would record the sound to share it with friends but the recordings always turned out horrible, not at all what I was hearing.

    • userbinator ・ 7 hours ago

      The frequency response of the mic probably has a lot to do with it; and unless you use stereo mics on a dummy head, the spatial effects won't be quite the same.

nsxwolf ・ 8 hours ago

HHKB sounds nothing like mine. Weird to type on it and hear a totally different sound.

Model M sounds reasonably close, Unicomp Classic sounds very wrong.

  • akashwadhwani35 ・ 7 hours ago

    The HHKB was a Niz Purple Hybrid as a Topre stand-in — flagged as a "proxy" in the methodology but the name was still HHKB, which was misleading. Swapped it for a real HHKB Pro Hybrid recording (CC0 sample from grcekh on Freesound).

    Unicomp was outright broken, a single file mapped to every key, which is why it sounded very wrong. It now uses the bucklespring recording from the Model M entry, which is actually authentic because Unicomp builds these on the original IBM tooling. Both fixes are live now.

    • Karliss ・ 28 minutes ago

      If you don't have a suitable recording just remove the entry. Reusing soundfiles doesn't help anyone and is misleading.

langarus ・ 7 hours ago

Really nice stuff. But the mobile ux is horrendous.