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Mechanical Keyboard Sounds – A listening Museum
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ilovefrog 6mo agoi like the sound when im pressing the buttons but i can't stand listening to them in a recording its horrible
- thenthenthen 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoThe 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.
- tripdout 6mo agoAs 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 6mo agoThock is a filter if you type in the bar, and adding "Play sample" button, didn't think of it, but a good idea!
- tripdout 6mo agoI think you’ve misread my comment, I’m saying that thock does indeed work as a filter in the search bar!
- m463 6mo agoI always bought the non-clicky keyboards...
- phantomathkg 6mo agoThe 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 6mo agoWhy do they want my email though? Well, I can guess why. But why would some random email be useful for such a site?
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agoBuilding a newsletter, so I can keep sending cool pieces to your inbox
- pawsocks 6mo agoEverybody hates this and you know it, worsening the experience of real people for an absurdly small chance of personal profit
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agoremoved it
- utopcell 6mo agowhat profit?
- joelkoen 6mo agoLooks 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.
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agoRemoving it
- nickel0800 6mo agoNow its cleaner. Thank you!
- utopcell 6mo ago"Completely unusable" is an over-exaggeration. By default, assume good will.
- gblargg 6mo agoI 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.
- nsxwolf 6mo agoHHKB 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 6mo agoThe 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 6mo agoIf you don't have a suitable recording just remove the entry. Reusing soundfiles doesn't help anyone and is misleading.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 6mo agoOn 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 https://a.co/d/03j6Boy0 [1] low profile preference: https://a.co/d/06yVB6jg https://a.co/d/06yVB6jg
- eviks 6mo agoYes, silence should be the default
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agoyeah 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.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoI'm admittedly only a very surface level keyboard person (I can tell you the difference between Cherry reds, blues, and browns and know what a buckling spring is but not much use outside that), but aren't tactiles generally pretty quiet? Not as quiet as linears but honestly what I expect a keyboard to sound like
- miladyincontrol 6mo agoGenerally yes, I think many people confuse and correlate clicky switches with tactile switches. Clicky switches are always tactile, but tactile switches arent always clicky. Some have even quieter actuation but at that point I'd argue the biggest difference relates to bottoming out the switch and if theres any dampening efforts there.
- al_borland 6mo agoI 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 6mo 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.
- LichenStone 6mo agoI would recommend checking out Chyrosran22's keyboard reviews for a more fair comparison across different boards. He's reviewed just about every switch type under the sun at this point - https://www.youtube.com/@Chyrosran22/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Chyrosran22/videos At the end of every review he does a typing test, and for the last few years at least I think the mic has been in more or less the same kind of position and they've been recorded in the same room. You still have to apply a pinch of salt because I don't know if there's been significant differences in audio level normalisation/compression/EQ, but it would give you a more representative idea of what to expect.
- Melatonic 6mo agoCurious what he thinks about the OG switch - MX Blacks are still my favorite usually
- golem14 6mo agoHmmm. 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.
- userbinator 6mo agoTons of ten-hour-long typing sound videos on YouTube.
- golem14 6mo agoYeah, but generating it in mynoise would be way cooler. Could have one of the sounds be the guy in Simon's cat muttering to himself :)
- zimpenfish 6mo agoOn 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?
- golem14 6mo ago[0] Yeah, I'm not super happy, but I get that he needs to pay the bills. I think it's worth it, on the whole. I'm definitely do not have the right personality to obsess over the precise sounds like Stéphane. It's good he's doing the Lord's work for us. But yeah, having an app for a multi-generator, possibly programmable via Google home or so would be nice.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- psidebot 6mo agoI wish you could play it without typing. I can't hear it over my Cherry MX browns.
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agoAdded "Play" button in the sidebar
- langarus 6mo agoReally nice stuff. But the mobile ux is horrendous.
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agofixed it
- utopcell 6mo agoSomeone 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.
- chromadon 6mo agoMy 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 6mo agoGo for it, and please let me know what she decides
- bluGill 6mo agoIn general I find noise the unimportant part. I'm not listening to my keyboards (except my midi keyboards, and even then it isn't the physical keyboard it is what the sound engine it connects to does). Keyboard reviews focus on that because sound is something that can be objectively measured in a video. I tell by watching a video if I will like how a keyboard feels in my fingers.
- nowami 6mo agoLove 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 6mo agoFixed it, the iOS was cutting the audio pack
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- negura 6mo agoi'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 6mo agoI 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.
- bluGill 6mo agoI have to disagree. It isn't nonsense that a good keyboard feels good, and something that feels good makes someone more productive by inspiring them. What is nonsense is that everyone cares. For some people it won't make any difference. It also won't make any difference in the quality of work (except in the case the keyboard is broken) when you force yourself to work. If a good keyboard gets your over the hump and working then it isn't procrastination.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago
- marius_ 6mo agoAs 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)!
- akashwadhwani35 6mo agoThe fast typists who don't know how to use a mechanical keyboard, are the worst, that's true.