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)
Keyboard Layouts
Support for Alternate Layouts (dvorcol)
What is SpaceFN and why you should give it a try (dovenyi)
Keymap Layout Analysis (Keymap wizardry: Typing out the Harry Potter saga)...
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...
If you watched Star Wars for the first time, without seeing images of the Empire’s perfectly spaced thousands of goose-stepping minions in spotless white-lacquered armor. If you didn’t see the fleets of black and grey tie-fighters, the immaculately designed star cruisers, the evil moon-shaped flagship… you wouldn’t know that the rebels were rebels.
After all, rebels don’t look like rebels if they don’t have something to contrast them against. They just look like normal people. That’s probably why when you see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Finn (all rebels) dressed in stormtrooper garb, they somehow seem even more rebellious then they were before. It’s not what they’re wearing, it’s how they wear it. Dirty, scuffed, broken. Helmet missing or askew. An out of place, beat up weapon slung diagonally across their body. It’s the simple act of defacing the uniform that identifies them in our mind as counter-cultural.
Funnily enough, it works in reverse. To the dismay of...
That would be a cool shop to go to in a mall.
In some of my past posts and reviews I’ve written there have been requests to walk through my own process for building a keyboard for myself. I’m fortunate in that I get to build many keyboards. I haven’t logged every single keyboard that I’ve built, that would have been great, but hindsight is 20/20. The vast majority of the builds that I do are for other hobbyists. I built a small name for myself doing commissions and build services specializing in leveraging my extensive knowledge of the hobby to help acquire unique boards, make recommendations in build materials, and providing a truly personalized board for those who might not have known much about mechanical keyboards before reaching out to me. I started doing this service back in 2018, and now, being a dad, husband and full time IT specialist, I tend to only accept a couple commissions at a time. I’ve got my own backlog of boards, my collection seems to continually grow, and I...
Wouldn’t the proper phrasing for these be “artisanal” keycaps and not “artisan” keycaps?
As I was looking through the ‘Mech Keys Guide List’ here on Drop a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to see that there were effectively no articles detailing arguably one of the most unique and interesting niches of the mechanical keyboard community – artisan keycaps. In fact with each passing day I find myself sinking further and further into the depths of artisan keycaps and have gained an appreciation of them that far surpasses any expectations I could have ever had after getting my very first one. Despite artisan keycaps being fairly ubiquitous in this day and age, and with beginner friendly storefronts like Drop selling alongside prebuilt, accessible mechanical keyboard kits, I still find that those freshly diving into the keyboard hobby have a very skewed (mis)understanding of these kinds of keycaps, why they are priced the way they are, and all of the variety that exist out there...
Desoldering, Mill-Maxing, And Why You Might Want To Learn Both
Thanks to StoryboardTech’s fantastic article, you finally learned how to solder! Or at least, you’re committed to learning. So, what’s next?
Well, if you’re brave enough, why not learn how to desolder as well? And when you feel confident with that, how about Mill-Max? You don’t necessarily have to know or learn how to solder before learning how to desolder or Mill-max, but in my opinion, getting comfortable with soldering is a great step towards learning how to do the other two, and if you know how to solder, you can practice desoldering and mill-maxing to your heart’s content since you’ll already have the tools from learning how to solder! Well, at least most of the tools.
Let’s start off with the good ol’ disclaimer section first, however.
Disclaimer
These are my own opinions and my own thoughts, and if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that we all do things in slightly different ways. Whether it be deadlifting, desoldering, Mill-Maxing or even baking...
Keymap optimization: language statistics and important indicators
Welcome back to this series where we’re designing kick-ass keymaps! After covering basics like how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers and the potential of custom keymaps, we took the first real steps in designing your tailor-fit keymap by looking into some options for compiling a corpus in general and also with a more useful personal corpus in mind.
Quick recap: in this context, corpus is simply a fancy name for a big chunk of text.
Today, we’re going to analyze your corpus (or pretty much any text if you haven't done your homework yet) and discuss some basic language statistics along with common metrics that can be used to quickly evaluate a keymap, and also to compare layouts. This is the next logical step in our journey if you're aiming to craft the optimal keymap for yourself.
Character/bigram/trigram frequencies
To begin with, let's examine the character frequencies in our corpus. The occurrence of different letters can vary significantly not only between...
Top Left: CustomNeko (Bakeneko With Through-Weight) With KKB BoW And Accents, Top Right: Cannonkeys Bakeneko60 With GMK Norse, Bottom Left: Ciel60 With KKB Abyss, Bottom Right: Jixte60 With GMK Analog Dreams
“Simplicity is boring, but I still love it.” - Sukant Ratnakar.
When I first got into the hobby back in 2017, there was no way that I would’ve thought that I’d enjoy a 60% layout keyboard. Sure, maybe a 75% (I didn’t use the nav cluster for non-work situations, and when I was at work, I needed a numpad) in order to retain the function row, or, at the very least, a 65% where I had dedicated arrows, but a 60%? Absolutely no way! I need dedicated arrows! I need a function row!
It’s funny how preferences change, huh?
For the next installment in my “Why I Love” series (the first was the “Why I Love Prototype Runs And Helping Keyboard Designers” article I wrote a few weeks back), please allow me a bit of your time to explain to you not only why I love 60% layout keyboards...
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