Last week I bought a new keyboard called “das keyboard”. It is available in 2 different versions. The default one built with cherry mx blue switches and a silent version built with cherry mx browns. The browns are not as loud as the blue ones since they don’t click and the frequency of the noise is lower. People tend to be more disturbed by higher frequencies than lower ones. But if it comes to the noise level of the whole keyboard the silent version is not as silent as it’s name states. Since the mx blue switches have a better tactile feedback, it is easy to not “bottom out” the keys. This is not the case using the mx brown switches. So some of the noise of a “das keyboard” in the silent version is produced when you bottom out the keys. This is a known issue with a known solution. It is called “o-ring mod” or “soft landing pad mod”. The basic idea is to reduce the bottom out sound by damping the landing of the key cap using an o-ring or a thin rubber pad. I ordered the landing pads in shop called elitekeyboards. Since the stuff needs to be shipped from the US it may take a while until I’ll blog about doing the actual mod.
As stated earlier, this only eliminates the source of “some of the noise”. There is another source of noise created by the key switch returning to its original position. I didn’t find a solution for this problem but I’ll keep searching :-)
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