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...
Keyboards at work: A rationale for returning mechanical keyboards to the office environment.
As I walk down the hall to my office each morning, I hear the discordant clattering of keys coming from my coworker’s office. In the hall… several doors down… I hear them. Like the loose teeth in my grandma’s poodle, barely hanging on, they rattle and heave. If anyone’s ever told you that mechanical keyboards are too loud, it’s simply because that person has become completely desensitized to the garbage-bomb that is the standard office computer keyboard.
In the 1980’s and 90’s, it was common to hear the sound of unmitigated excellence when you walked into an office building. The rapid gunfire-like precision of a room full of high-quality computer keyboards firing in unison. Even in the early 2000’s when I worked in a south-side Chicago newspaper newsroom, it was still filled with such keyboards. Ten to fifteen years into their professional daily use, they were still magnificent in sound and feel. Punctual, clean, decisive. In those days, professional keyboards didn’t come...
Stabilizer Shake Down - A breakdown of modern MX-style stabilizers
One of the best parts of custom keyboards is the sound they make. It’s clean, crisp, and free from any chatter or rattles. On a well-built custom keyboard, each keystroke is solid and definitive. On the smaller keys on your keyboard, keys 1.75 units or less, you can attribute that feeling to the switches themselves. However, on larger keys, keys that are 2 units and larger, stabilizers can make or break that feeling. Today, there are a plethora of different stabilizer options available for purchase. It can be confusing trying to navigate the different brands and configurations of stabilizers. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll have the confidence to purchase the stabilizer that fits both your budget and your needs.
Before laying out the stabilizer options, it is important to understand their function within a keyboard. Stabilizers serve two main purposes. The first is to ensure that when pressing a larger key (2 units or larger) there is consistency in the keycap press. This...
Figure 1: What could be so confusing about some pretty NOS Alps SKCL Greens?
Having thoroughly beaten my opinions to death on well over a hundred different modern, MX-style switches over the past few years, one of the most common questions I get revolves around why I hardly use and/or review vintage, non-MX style switches at all. After all, the wide world of vintage mechanical keyboard switches is full of unique, odd mechanisms and “all modern switches are just recolors of each other.” While I take personal issue with that incredibly misguided second claim, I can totally understand how people can look at the wide swathes of variation in vintage switches and naturally think that that would be something I’d gravitate towards. And for what it’s worth, vintage switches are both incredibly interesting and something that I have quite a lot of hiding away in boxes. Some of my favorite brands and styles include RAFI Hall Effect switches, Hi-Tek 725s of all forms, SMK Inverse...
Finding your groove: getting into vinyl with Audio-Technica
I’d like to think that I could’ve been friends with the late Hideo Matsushita, founder of Japanese Hi-Fi powerhouse Audio-Technica. If I could, I’d travel back in time to 1960’s Tokyo, where a young Matsushita curated “vinyl listening sessions” at the Bridgestone Museum of Arts, exposing visitors to the sounds and possibilities of high end audio and the warmth of vinyl records. I imagine sitting with him in a mod coffee shop, listening to the stories of what he witnessed in those sessions, the conversations he had with visitors, and what ultimately motivated him to head back to his small apartment above a ramen restaurant and start an audio company of his own.
In the histories I’ve read regarding AT’s humble beginnings, Matsushita’s motives seem clear. Produce high end audio at affordable prices, bringing audio excellence into spaces and to customers that simply didn’t have access to it before. His first two products, the AT-1 and AT-3 phono cartridges did exactly that, and...
Image credit @zhugunic https://drop.com/talk/67372/gl-2-k
Do I need an amp? What are these acronyms like DAC, DSP, or DSD? What even are all the components that make up an audio chain? Let’s take a beginner’s look at the core, essential building blocks of a digital audio chain, and lay it plain what each piece does. We can cover the major pieces separately, but I’ll still include a few tips to optimize playback here. Please hit the little bookmark button and feel free to check and share this guide whenever you need a reference!
For people who need a visual and audible explanation, or are worried it would take too long to get a working knowledge of the audio chain, here is my YouTube video on this subject that is just 7 minutes long! I like writing though, so let’s get started with an overview, then break it down into what each piece does and how an upgrade would benefit the final sound quality.
Signal Path
Image credit @SpeleoFool https://drop...
As we publish more articles in the "Mech Keys How-To" series currently ongoing, navigating the various topics and finding previous articles will only become more difficult. This thread will serve as a table of contents to help add some structure to the whole project.
Feel free to also suggest future topics in this thread, as it will surely be easier to identify gaps and opportunities for further exploration when viewing everything as a whole.
Mechanical Keyboards
Introductory Topics
Mechanical vs Membrane
Sizes and Layouts of Mechanical Keyboards
Short Intro Into Split Keyboards (dovenyi)
Staggered and Ortholinear Layouts
Low-Profile vs High-Profile Keyboard Designs
Build Materials and Other Case Design Considerations
Selecting Your First Mechanical Keyboard (The_Manic_Geek)
Keycaps
Keycap Materials
Keycap Profiles
In Defense of MT3 (StoryBoardTech)
How To Design a GMK Keycap Set (GMK_Andy)
The GMK Color Matching Process (GMK_Andy)
SA Keycap Profile in 2024...
Introducing the latest keycap set designed by MrBingo—inspired by a retro classic.
DCD WLK-MN takes cues from an iconic device from the past, combining the nostalgia of yesteryear with the modern functionality of mechanical keyboards. Featuring a sleek color scheme of blue, gray, and orange, these keycaps will bring a pop of personality to any custom keyboard setup. Made with high-quality PBT material, they are built to last and provide a comfortable typing experience.
This is MrBingo's first collaboration with Drop, but he's no stranger to keycap design. Stay tuned for a future Story featuring an interview with MrBingo discussing his history, inspirations, and designs.
"I am a very nostalgic person; I love to look back and see how things have evolved by leaps and bounds. That's why I view the things of the past with both joy and a hint of sadness. What seemed so advanced at the time now appears quite simple. I'm not saying I feel like I was born in the wrong...
Everyone perceives sound differently. Your ear is not like a measuring microphone. Because of this, it’s important to understand how sound is perceived and what factors influence that perception. In creating the OAE1 signature with Axel Grell, we studied how sound is perceived and what factors influence that perception.
This premise drove the unique geometry and driver placement for the OAE1 Signature headphones. Since our ears, with all their unique characteristics, act as a natural equalizer to all that we hear, it makes sense that headphones should do more to use the structure of the pinna to guide soundwaves into the ear canal. To achieve this effect, the transducers are placed much further forward and angled back towards the ear. By positioning the transducer further out and away it enables the soundwaves to fully encompass the pinna (the external part of the ear), allowing for an increase in spectral information and a more natural sound field for the listener. By...
DCL (Drop Cylindrical Lumen) is our latest keycap profile added to the portfolio here at Drop. You’ve seen these keycaps already—they are included with the CSTM80 and CSTM65, our most recent keyboard launches.
Overview
The goal with DCL keycaps is to offer a high-quality shine-through-compatible keycap profile that is fully compatible with south-facing switches. Not only for the sake of physical interference, but perhaps more importantly, the functionality of shine-through.
In addition to a premium look and feel, we also wanted to ensure that the sound of the keycaps is not negatively affected by any design choices. The end result is a thick ABS keycap coated in an opaque outer layer which is then laser-ablated to remove the top layer, creating front-facing legends for optimal shine-through.
Comparison
To help illustrate the importance of properly-oriented shine-through keycaps and show the full range of offerings, here is a quick family photo of all of Drop’s...
SA in 2024: Where does the high-profile king stand in the modern keyboard hobby?
In early 2021, I only had eyes for SA Godspeed.
Raised in Florida across the bay from Cape Canaveral, I grew up watching space shuttle launches, and my dad’s life-long obsession with NASA, space and sci-fi quickly spread to me. At 27, I was introduced to Neil Armstrong, a personal hero, and was able to tell him the impact he had on me and my family. So on that fateful spring day when I walked into my IT department and told my coworkers that I was thinking of getting into mechanical keyboards, the first set I wanted to own was Godspeed. It took awhile, and I mean awhile for me to accumulate all the different versions of that set. It has three alphas (Solar, Lunar and Supernova), a few full alternates (Mito & Genespeed) and several alternate modifier sets including the transcendent Ares colorway. But several hundred dollars, and many months later, I had constructed a few keyboards all equipped with different versions of SA Godspeed. I made an Earth keyboard, a Mars, an Asteroid, a...
Creating a flexible novelty tool for DCX keycap sets
Before we can talk about the nuances of different novelty tool designs, it’s important to discuss how DCX keycaps are produced to begin with. DCX tooling is all designed to use a doubleshot injection molding process, which first injects the inner legend shot, then flips the entire metal slab of tooling to another portion of the machine, where the outer shot of plastic is injected to complete the keycap. In contrast, an alternative method would be to use a process called “insert molding”, which creates many of the inner legend shots in a row before—you guessed it—inserting those back into a different machine for the outer shot to be molded around. Each process has its pros and cons. Most important to the topic at hand, the doubleshot process is very efficient and designed to produce an entire keycap set’s worth of keys at once. However, this comes at the cost of rigidity, requiring an entire new tool to be produced if you want to...
Figure 1: My Imada force gauge machine gifted to me by Drop mid-collection of a Drop Holy Panda X force curve.
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...
The secret bedrock of any technology-heavy hobby is a whole bunch of slang and jargon that makes it feel borderline like a second language to outsiders listening in on discussions about the hobby. Mechanical keyboards are, much to your surprise I’m sure, no exception to that rule. Unfortunately, having been around for as long as I have been, I’ve become a bit of the problem and have found myself casually shooting acronyms and concepts way above my friends and coworkers heads as I talk to them about keyboards. Equally as disappointing of me is that this has also seeped into my content, as well. In fact, as I was looking through some of my old writing the other day, I realized that I have eternally used one phrase - “OEM” - without ever actually elaborating on what explicitly I mean by such in the broader context of mechanical keyboard switches. While I get that it feels really basic and easy for many people who have been deep in the hobby for some time to kind of understand...
Ho Ho Ho, everyone!
12 Days of Christmas is back this year, bringing more of the same holiday cheer. If you haven't started opening your gifts, now is the perfect time.
Here's the rundown on 12 Days of Christmas:
▪️ The event will run for 12 days (fitting), starting today, Dec 1st, and ending on Dec 12th
▪️ Each day and each present opened will result in a new gift for you—no repeat coupons/gifts
▪️ While the gift-opening event is going, we are also running our 12 Days of Christmas Sale; place your in-stock orders now and most should deliver before the holidays* (if you want to guarantee delivery before the holidays and are purchasing in the latter half of the event, please pick an expedited shipping method)
If you win something good, let the community know! Comment below and share the holiday magic.
As always, the usual reminders:
▪️ It’s a great time to join DKC and take advantage of the minimum $30 discount coupon during our holiday events! (note that coupon codes...
We met designer ArqKeebs in the previous Studio Story for DCD Bird Jungle. Now, let’s learn a little more about the keycap set itself—how Arq pulls inspiration from the real world and creates unique and compelling designs based on various source materials.
Clearly birds are a common theme between your most recent set and the Bird Jungle keycap set; have you always been interested in ornithology, or was that a more recent interest? Is there anything in particular that draws you to birds over other inspiration?
Honestly it's something recent. After seeing the Hyacinth macaw everything changed. I never paid attention to birds before. It's like when you see something once then see it everywhere. People need to take 5 minutes just to google up some birds. There are some wild and just stunning birds. Their colors are truly wonderful.
Side question as a board game fan—have you ever played Wingspan? If so, does that inspire you with its artwork and design choices?
I didn't...
ArqKeebs has been around in the mechanical keyboard hobby for some time now, and has taken an impressive number of keycap sets from idea to fruition over that time. It would seem that the only thing he hasn’t done until now is introduce himself to the Drop community!
So, we wanted to help get that out of the way with some questions for Arq, starting with who he is and what he’s all about (an interview more specific to the DCD Bird Jungle keycap set and his design process is coming in the next Story). Thank you to Arq for letting us peek behind the curtain!
Render created by Bingo. Model created by werk.technica.
We’ll start easy—tell us a bit about yourself and your history, mech keys related or not. Where are you from, what is your day job (if applicable), what are your other hobbies and interests outside of keyboards?
My name is David, but everyone calls me Arq. I was born in Peru, but I came to New York City when I was thirteen. I graduated a bit over 2 years ago...
My grandpa was a truck driver for 40 years, and in that time he used two thermoses. I own them both, and the smaller of the two, which was clearly used on hundreds of runs, has a scratched and faded line of text below the label that reads “Thermal Efficiency guaranteed 5 years.” It might as well have said “105 years” because it works as well today as the day he bought it. That thermos is incredibly well designed, well made, and I assume it will work for another 50 years unless something drastic happens to it.
You’ll often hear people say “they don’t make things like they used to” and in my experience, that’s largely true. Products in the past were often made with longevity in mind, and to be honest, it was easier to build them so sturdy back then. Tools weren’t computerized, the parts weren’t as tiny, and the types of metal and plastic they were made from were costly and often machined with a human involved in the process.
I adore technology and surround my desktop space...
Figure 1: While this is a good start from user destohfaeda, this isn't anywhere near complete...
After having collected switches for almost five consecutive years now, I can say with confidence that everything switch related comes and goes in ever-looping cycles. Strong tactile bumps towards the start of the downstroke were once novel and popular, faded out of the limelight over the past few years, and are only just now starting to make a comeback. Huge leaps in housing aesthetics happened back when the first custom colored MX-style switches began being offered in 2018, and now five years later these massive leaps in design capabilities are surging again. Even things contextually related to switches rotate around and around in cycles. One such switch-related phenomenon which repeats in a (much faster) loop is that of people wanting to make a complete list of “every switch ever”. Almost on a monthly basis for every single month since I started collecting, at least one new...
As cool as sweet colors and designer top cases might be, the long-lasting joy from your board is going to come from the way it feels and sounds. So, here’s a bit on the approach we took with CSTM.
Mounting / Acoustics / Feedback:
The CSTM is gasket mounted to optimize for typing feedback, acoustics and ease of customization. Gasket mounting has been all the rage for a while and we’ve all seen different implementations, though not all are equal. In many ways, the drive for customization and options led us to offer a product that can be built out in many ways in order to find an individual’s optimal preferences when they are using their keyboard.
Bouncy / Flex
Due to the decentralized nature of the keyboard community, as new tech developments come, their names and degree of preference can run the gamut. Naming sometimes doesn't stick or definitions remain somewhat nebulous. For example, bouncy and flexy are often used interchangeably in the community but they actually...
We’ve already talked about everything inside the CSTM80 keyboard, but what about the most visible and aesthetically-important aspect—the interchangeable top case? The idea, obviously, was to create a platform that lets you coordinate the keyboard case with your keycaps, your setup, your decor. There are other good keyboards out there in various colors and finishes, some nicely matched to the keycaps they come with. But, we thought it might be extra sweet if you could instantly and affordably change the keyboard to match your next favorite keycaps or gear or wallpaper without having to buy a whole new board.
We’ve already got a good amount in the works there, as well as a ton of potential for the designers we work with to expand their canvas outward from keycaps to encompass the entire board (along with deskmats and more). Let’s dive in.
Case Swapping
Cases are attached to the keyboard itself with an array of magnets—easy to pop off, yet secure and stable when needed. Simply...
In defense of MT3, the most misunderstood and possibly greatest keycap profile.
Offices are tense spaces, there’s no way around it. Whether they’re silent, museum-like tombs or raucous zoos filled with energy. In this place of distraction, and often discomfort, it’s important to have tools that make you more efficient, comfortable and focused. Personally, I am lucky to work in a happy, healthy work environment with amazing coworkers, but my office is filled with distraction and on my best days it’s a challenging ecosystem in which to create.
I’ll be honest, I’m no gamer, and it wasn’t the speedy, silent linear switches or 8000Hz polling rates of gaming boards that drew me to this hobby. It was the spirit of clickety-clackety typewriters of the past and a desire to craft my words on a surface that deserved them… one that amplified my ideas and provided a comfy ambience that encouraged creativity.
I don’t feel old, and certainly don’t act old, but I’ve been a designer for 25 of my 43 years and in that whole time I’ve hated the keyboards I’ve used. With the...
At the time work began on the upcoming Drop + Grell headphones, Drop and Axel Grell were showing off their first collaboration – the wireless TWS1X – at the New York CanJam show. Behind the scenes Axel had been working on his next concept to develop and the discussion evolved into Drop asking Axel to create a version exclusively for its Audiophile members. Axel himself was, of course, already well known among this crowd for the sound of the highly popular wired headphones he developed while working at Sennheiser. So, the pursuit began to create the ideal-performing Axel Grell wired headphone with the most open-back design possible.
The headphone was to originally share many of the same parts as his starting concept, such as the headband and most of the earcups. As development progressed it was decided that rather than design a headphone which could lead to two models it was better to optimize the design for one to maximize its performance. This led to a complete redesign...
The headlining feature of the upcoming CSTM80 keyboard is the magnetically attached (and easily swapped) top case, allowing you to easily customize the aesthetics of your board on a whim. That said, there is a lot going on under the hood of CSTM80 to create a full-featured board out of the box, and we’ll focus on those features in this story.
Typing Feel and Sound
CSTM80 features a peg-type gasket-mounted plate design, shipping with a polycarbonate plate by default for both the fully-built and barebones versions. The PC plate offers a satisfying typing sound and allows for a good amount of flex to take advantage of the gasket-mounting construction. The stock sound with the included linear switches (Gateron Yellow KS3) has a subtle marbly-ness while not sounding overly muted or deadened, and the included tactile switches (Gateron Browns) sound surprisingly similar while maintaining a strong tactility. We’ll let the (soon-to-come) typing tests show the sound better than...
Figure 1: A fantastic Kailh switch photo from Blitzenx51!
There’s any number of different details people look into when they’re trying to pick out switches for their next keyboard build. However, arguably none of them are as vague and mysterious as the materials used to make housings and stems. Yes, even as manufacturers are iffy about their spring weights and newer brands are sketchy about who actually made their switches, differentiating POM from Nylon from Polycarbonate remains to this day the least understood parts of mechanical keyboard switches. For what it’s worth, I don’t have a fix for that either. As someone who has completed a master’s degree in chemical engineering focusing on polymer science, I understand full well that attempting to reverse engineer the formulas of even the most simple keyboard switch materials would take months on end and nearly free-range access to numerous analytical instruments that companies simply won’t hand over to you. However, that...
We’re excited to announce our first collaboration with xDuoo—and our first-ever OTL tube amplifier. Building on xDuoo’s extensive product line and solid reputation in the amplifier space, we worked closely with their engineers to create a brand new tube amplifier designed to pair with high-impedance headphones like our ever-popular HD6XX and HD58X. It’s the Drop + xDuoo OTL Tube DAC/Amp—and it’s totally tubular.
From the earliest designs, we intended the amp to pair with high impedance headphones of 120 ohms up to 600 ohms. For this reason—among sonic preferences—we chose an Output Transformerless (OTL) topology for the amp, since it pairs so well with high impedance loads. Many fans of OTL amps such as the Darkvoice 336 and Bottlehead Crack are well aware of the magical attributes these amps can have when paired with a suitable set of cans.
The tube configuration uses a total of 4 tubes (2 per channel). For the preamp tubes, we chose the ECC 82 (equivalent to the...
CTRL, ALT, SHIFT V2
We think it’s fair to say Drop’s original CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT keyboards have earned a place as classics within the hobby. But, since their debut, it’s also fair to say there has been a lot of evolution among mechanical keyboards. So, what do you do to modernize a classic without sacrificing what made it so in the first place? And, beyond that, what might something totally new look like?
When we’ve done customer surveys and asked buyers why they picked one of the three the answer is usually the same - the design. Machined from a solid block of aluminum, then sandblasted and anodized, with pleasant rounded corners and simple-yet-elegant industrial design, CTRL, ALT and SHIFT look as great as they feel.
However, the common complaints we’ve heard are related to stabilizers, switch compatibility, and typing sound. So, we’d like to introduce you to the V2 family of these icons.
The refreshed V2 versions of CTRL, ALT and SHIFT will all have several...
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