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Moondrop DASH Mechanical Hi-Fi Keyboard

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Moondrop DASH Mechanical Hi-Fi Keyboard

Name: Moondrop DASH Mechanical Hi-Fi Keyboard
Brand: Moondrop
SKU: moondrop-keyboard-dash
Price: 350 USD
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 3.403226 (62 reviews)

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Frequently bought together:

Drop + MiTo MT3 9009 PBT Keycap Set

Drop DCX Camillo Keycap Set

Drop Strata Desk Mat

Product Description

The Moondrop DASH Mechanical HIFI Keyboard is truly a hybrid experience for enthusiasts of both Mech Keys and high-end Audiophile products. That’s because in addition to all of the must-have keyboard features, there’s also a solid DAC built right in—so you can plug one cable into your computer and use the DASH as your main interface Read More

Customer Reviews

3.4

(62 reviews)

(16)

(20)

(10)

(5)

(11)

71% would recommend to a friend

By Feature

Sound

SilentLoud

Feel

StiffFlexible

Build Quality

3.5

(20)

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AirFreshner

Aug 3, 2024

Verified Buyer

Surprisingly bad!

Having paid in excess of £400 for this board, I had pretty high hopes! Having to pay an incredibly expensive customs charge due to drop not declaring the value of the goods correctly was pretty sad to see though. Customs declaration forms aren't that hard guys! For the first month, it was pretty nice. Sounded nice, the DAC is pretty ok. After the first month however, it started going downhill. The paint on the chassis started to chip off, it's only a single layer thick with no prime/base coat! Seriously, this is such a rookie mistake on such an expensive product. How did nobody notice this?! After coming to terms with the poor paint application and it starting to chip more and more to bare metal, *all* of the stabilisers lubricant has gone! Now, I could re-lubricate it, sure, but I shouldn't have to on such a 'premium' product. After having a change of career path from a blue collar to a white collar, I had a thought. "What if I use my at-home desk equipment? It's pretty high end, feels great and is all pretty good!" That's when I noticed, this keyboard is missing basic functionality for even a 75% - There's no home or end key! Well, I suppose I can't quite use this for work then. Right, so this keyboard's only good for home, but it doesn't look all that pretty anymore and is starting to sound pretty bad when typing. That's not so good... I wonder if I can use the USB ports for some hobby I'm doing - nope! The USB ports are way out of spec; they only provide 1.5w of power each, a little bit low for a 2 port hub. What about reliability then? Can it at least handle a low bandwidth but consistent device? Surely I can use this for something! Right? Wrong :( The USB hub within the keyboard isn't even MTT compatible. I would like to mention the FE2.1 USB hub controller IC has a cost of 1 USD. At this price point, that again surely couldn't be an issue! What's with this weird compromise to save literal pennies? Due to this, using two devices with a low but consistent load causes the controller in the hub to misbehave, and cause the keyboard, DAC, and the two other USB devices to all misbehave, requiring me to unplug the keyboard and then plug it back in. Ugh! Overall, I thought this was going to be great, but after a while it unfortunately turned to the quality I've over time come to expect from Drop and Moondrop - expensive and great for a short while, until it stops being so great after such a short time. Truly a shame.

(Edited)

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ichikiri

Jun 17, 2024

Activities:Work

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:9

Verified Buyer

Almost no complaints

Beautiful and convenient.

Recommends this product? Yes

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•

dasyummy

Dec 25, 2023

Activities:Work & Gaming

Paired Switch:Linear

Verified Buyer

Has potential to be a 5/5. I'm very happy with it

Yes, it's not perfect... it requires some work-arounds and upgrades.. but after a 10 months of ownership, I really love it and it fits me great. Likes:

Packaging - a cardboard box worth keeping
Built in USB hub - I was specifically looking for a KB with a hub because my computer is hidden/inaccessible and I didn't want to clutter my desk with a separate USB hub
Built-in good quality DAC
Good smooth, and clean sounding switches
Decent feeling keycaps
Spare switches, keycap and switch puller
Sounds very good out of the box thanks to pre-lube, tape and foam mods
Solid construction, materials, and build quality
Aesthetics - The design has that old school NASA mission control shape mixed with retro computing style and color.. love it! Brass accents give it a touch of class.

Dislikes:

Keycap legends font doesn't look good
Stock stabilizers don't fit DCX keycaps
Sometimes doesn't detect after waking from sleep
A couple of small chips on the finish - bottom center and front center :(
The stock cable - personal preference but I'm just not a fan of curly cables with scratchy sleeving and bulky connectors
Had 1 software hiccup, but I learnt how to overcome it and it's never happened again since.

How I overcame some of the weaknesses:

Swapped keycaps to DCX Hyperfuse
Swapped stabilizers to Durocks PCB mounted - took a long time... but it was worth it for compatibility. They feel better and sound better to boot.
Swapped cable to rotating magnet cable. Now if it doesn't detect after wake up, I can disconnect and re-connect within a second without any wear and tear on the USB-C port. Looks cleaner on the desk and also allows me to disconnect easily if I need to move my keyboard aside for any reason.
Haven't thought about a solution for the 2 small chips, but it's not visible with a wrist rest in front of it.

Overall, I am very happy with the Moondrop DASH and still have several plans (especially based around the USB hub) that I will gradually fulfill. I believe after the solutions I've implemented that this is a 5/5 KB for me.. The journey so far has been tumultuous, but extremely rewarding. Hope this baby passes the test of time, because I want to be buried with it!

Recommends this product? Yes

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Idkmeow117

Nov 21, 2023

Activities:Work & Gaming

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:3

Verified Buyer

Premium pre-built

Love the feel of the keys and the board it self is hefty couls definitely use it for self defense

Recommends this product? Yes

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wild-cat

Oct 23, 2023

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:20

Verified Buyer

This thing reek of problems

good things:

keystrokes sound and feel realy nice

bad things:

keymap randomly revert to original
sometimes bugged out and they board just keep registering some keys forever without being touched
it bricked on me a few times that i had to reflash firmware, which required me to take it apart. other vendors usually put the reset button right under the spacebar which only require taking off spacebar cap to press. not sure why they chose to put it o the bottom side of the pcb.
this is serve: the white color of the frame is paint, and unfortunately, it's cheap paint which flake off after less than 3 months for me. what the actual fuck is this? this shit cost $400, not $100. come on!

Recommends this product? No

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ray.zenz

Sep 7, 2023

Activities:Work & Gaming

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:5

Verified Buyer

One of the best pre-builts on the market

My only nitpicks are its rattley stabs, which are easily fixable, and its unresponsiveness after being woken up from sleep mode. Aside from that, you're essentially paying a little over 100 dollars for a very solid keyboard that arrives sounding great and 200 for the Moonriver 2.

Recommends this product? Yes

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Huitzilihuitl

Aug 27, 2023

Activities:Work & Gaming

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:14

Verified Buyer

A good keyboard that needs some tuning to be excellent

This keyboard was given to me as a birthday present and I am a fan. I like the weight of it and the metal construction and the detailing. Though mine does have a slight chip and what looks like a dent or compression in the metal, it isn’t very noticeable, but the quality control could have been a bit better. The Moondrop & G-Square switches it came with suit me perfectly, linear, and not too heavy to hit they feel nice and smooth. I replaced the keycaps with the second part of my present, instead using the Buger & Hammerworks C64 set. These are excellent with the keyboard colour scheme, and while I have no problem with the included keycaps these replacements look much better and sound great with the switches. I had one issue with both original and new spacebar lifting on one side when used, but as all the stablisers rattled I replaced them all with some lubricated aftermarket ones and that fixed the issue. Still, I feel like that was another quality control problem that slipped through. I have the DAC powering a HD6XX through a balanced cable and music has never sounded better on my headphones.

Recommends this product? Yes

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yungc604

Jun 24, 2023

Verified Buyer

Moondrop support aren't proactive, chase them yourself! support@moondroplab.com

Updated July 17th 2023: After contacting moondrop support at support@moondroplab.com, they sent over a replacement hub PCB as well as an entire moondrop keyboard PCB. Can confirm that the update fixes the biggest pain point issue of USB hub detection. I think with this update, the keyboard now squarely falls into the "good" category, and I'm quite confident that future models of this keyboard are worth buying. As a first adopter of a pretty niche product, I'm not surprised that the product released with a bunch of weird issues. However, it does suck that I only found out about a hardware fix to my issue through drop.com forums, and reaching out to drop.com support, rather than this being something proactively fixed or advertised by moondrop themselves. Thus review stays at a 3 - it's a good product, though the end-user support definitely leaves something to be desired. Original Review: While the majority of the keyboard is great, it's incredibly let down by the janky PCB and firmware choices. On the software side, their website https://moondropvia.com/ doesn't even work at time of writing, all software is only available on PC, and it isn't even a true version of VIA and QMK. On the hardware side, they apparently shipped out a buggy PCB (as evidenced in: https://drop.com/buy/moondrop-keyboard-dash/reviews/2934589). As a result, the keyboard will start transmitting imagined inputs if left alone for too long. You might think you can avoid this avoidance by turning off your PC, but au contrair the keyboard struggles being detected on PC restart. (tested on mac mini) I really wish that the team had been a bit more proactive on communicating the PCB issue, as this singular review seems to be the only place I've gotten any validation from the moondrop team that there is indeed a PCB bug at all. As it is, the net amount of annoyance from the PCB bug means I find it really hard to recommend the product, as the issues ultimately end up affecting how you even use your PC.

(Edited)

Recommends this product? Yes

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KeyboardPapi

Oct 11, 2023

yungc604have you had any issues since? I also received a replacement board and hub. After about 2 days of being installed, it no longer works.

AnotherPasserby

Jun 13, 2023

Activities:Work & Gaming

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:1

Verified Buyer

Post Drama Impressions - (After Repairing an Early Unit)

After the dust has settled, I'm happy to say I can finally write a review for this very unique board. For those unaware, the original run of the Dash75 shipped with a USB Device Hub of revision [3.9.1] This led to several issues where the board would fail to be recognized by a PC without constant unplug/replug before dying entirely after a week or so. A replacement USB hub would have been far more trivial, if the old one had not damaged the main board as well... Moondrop says, "Nah, we got you fam." and sends an entire replacement PCB as well as an updated USB Hub (Revision 4.1 if anyone is curious. Arrived June 10th), they also extended the warranty by a year, among other things. Disassembly/Reassembly was straight forward: remove caps, switches, and carefully lift a few layers of dampening foam before replacing the PCB and USB Hub themselves. Had a minor panic attack when the MoonRiver 2, which mind you remained unharmed throughout this endeavor, failed to be recognized at first. Turns out I didn't plug it in all the way, haha. Anyway, the difference in 4.X is immediately apparent. For one, there's no fiddling to get the PC to recognize it, now it picks up the keyboard instantly and I can finally focus on the positive aspects of the board. The aluminum finish is very nice, and the white linear switches were surprisingly pleasant (though the tactile gray switches they give you as a sample were rather enticing, perhaps I should get a set of those)? No rattling in sight, and the MoonRiver 2 is a solid DAC/AMP, absolutely no complaints there. Conclusion Given future orders (if/when it's restocked) will likely include Hub Revision 4.X by default, I can easily recommend this keyboard to someone seeking a high-end aluminum board and a minimalist setup (MoonRiver2 built-in, so no wire mess).

Included is a picture of the old faulty USB Hub - 3.9.1

Recommends this product? Yes

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yungc604

Jun 24, 2023

AnotherPasserbyThanks for sharing this issue, I thought I was the only poor sod who had wonky behavior with the keyboard. Had no clue they had a fixed PCB, only found out because I finally found the time to google the issue. Great to see that you've had the issue fixed, but I can guess a lot of owners bought the keyboard and still have no idea why things are so wonky.

Debian10

Jun 5, 2023

Activities:Work

Paired Switch:Linear

Keyboards Owned:10

Verified Buyer

Would have been 5 stars

I really enjoy this keyboard and it’s the most unique one I have yet. It is my daily driver and mainly because it has an amp to drive these nice HD 6XX headphones that I’m enjoying quite well too. The key caps and switches work wonderful together and it makes me feel more productive when I’m typing on it with those moondrop lunar switches. One issue it after it’s in sleep mode, it does not wake up sometime. I have to unplug and plug to get it back to working again. Would definitely buy again and only recommend to those that are enthusiasts.

Recommends this product? Yes

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