Mechanical Keyboard Sound Isn't That Simple
Figure 1: I couldn't think of a more literal way to represent this article if I tried... Looking back just a few years ago, there’s no doubt that the huge influx of people that joined the hobby at the peak of the COVID pandemic were drawn to keyboards by way of YouTube, TikTok, and other audio-visual content platforms. Even as the output from these content creators has waned in recent months, their collective impact and legacy on the keyboard hobby is rather firmly etched in the history books. As a result of all of their sound tests, build logs, and opinion videos, the message is clear to any new person joining the hobby: mechanical keyboards are all about the sound. Thock this, clack that. Whether it’s keyboards, keycaps, or even singular switches, seemingly everyone new to the hobby meticulously pores over each component of their keyboard not in an attempt to figure out how it will feel in hand, but how it will sound as they’re furiously grinding their way out from...
Mar 27, 2024
Over the course of the last year or so of writing switch reviews of my own, I’ve been integrating more and more data into my descriptions and comparisons of switches. This is seen no more clearly than in the dozens of wiggly-lined graphs, known as ‘Force Curves’, that now sprout up in the dozens on each of my latest reviews. While I’ve managed to avoid dragging the discussion of force curves into any of my short articles on Drop thus far, the increasing use of them throughout my work means I should probably get around to discussing them sometime soon. After all, while I live and die by this kind of information for switches, I fully well understand that I am more obsessed about switches than the vast majority of (admittedly kind of already weird) mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. However, I think that knowing a thing or two about force curves could make a big difference in the hunt for your perfect, endgame switches. So, here’s the quickest and easiest introduction to force curves and how to read them so you can make the most informed switch purchasing decisions. At the absolute most basic level, a ‘force curve’ is a graph that shows you how heavy a switch is at every single stage of it being pressed in and released. Or, rather, it’s simply an objective, graphical representation of how the switch feels in your hand! More specifically, a force curve depiction and what you actually feel when pressing in a switch are the exact same thing - the complex interaction of the spring, the stem, and the leaves of the switch that complete a circuit to register a keystroke in your keyboard. While these force curve diagrams were once upon a time pretty rare to see on vendor’s and manufacturer’s sales pages, they are becoming increasingly more common with new switch manufacturer marketing techniques and a couple of enthusiasts collecting force curves of their own. (See the work from enthusiasts like HaaTa, Pylon, and even my own Force Curve Repository!) Regardless of who made the force curves that you encounter on a sales page or in a data repository, they almost always are displayed in the form of an x vs. y style of graph which plots force or weight (vertical) against displacement or stem travel distance (horizontal) and feature two curves - one for the downstroke of a switch (pushing it in) and one for the upstroke (releasing it). In the event that they aren’t labeled or color coded, the downstroke curve will almost always be the one that is higher up on the graph and can be read as if you were pushing in the switch by looking from the left end of the curve at 0 grams of force (gf) to the right end where it bottoms out, or reaches its maximum force. Here’s an example force curve with some labels to help digest all of that new information: