No, the title isn’t clickbait. Sound tests are lies, let me explain.
Those of you who’ve been in this hobby for a while know this already. But I think everyone new
tries to interpret sound tests as a baseline at one point. But think about it. Think about
how many factors affect keyboard sound that aren't related to the keyboard.
In fact, I’ll list a bunch as quickly as I can. Typing force, deskmat presence, deskmat material,
deskmat thickness, desk material, desk hardness, desk thickness, microphone type,
microphone placement, microphone angle, room acoustics, post processing methods, youtube
compression, the headphones you use, and even down to super minute things like air temperature. Yes,
even air temperature affects keyboard sound, colder temperatures
make lube more thick, and vice versa. But that’s a topic for a different video.
But we don’t make claims on this channel without backing them up. How much does sound change?
For every experiment, we’re going to be using this mode eighty,
with lubed and filmed holy bobas in an FR4 plate. It is tape modded and PE foam modded,
but this shouldn’t skew our results since we’re comparing board sound as a whole.
Let's start with tables, but first.
This is the Comhar by Flexispot. It’s a very high quality motorized standing desk. Assembly
is simple and quick. All we need to do is put together the tabletop, frame, and 2 bottom feet.
Plug it in, and it’s ready to use. You can set memory profiles to easily switch between
your preferred heights. Personally, I have profile 1 set to sitting height,
and profile 2 set to standing. There’s also some USB outlets so you can charge your devices easily.
It comes with this super neat anti collision function, which will prevent the desk from
hitting things when lowering the height. It rises and lowers pretty quickly and quietly.
Its design is very sturdy, high quality, and clean, and will easily fit into any
sort of office or room. The Comhar specifically comes with this premium feeling bamboo texture,
and your choice of a white or black steel frame. I could totally see myself using this
as my editing PC desk, or as a filming table dedicated for keyboard b-roll.
And under the tabletop is a sleek embedded drawer, useful for storing things like,
5 keyboards. With this desk I can easily record a sound test, put the keyboard away, switch to
standing, and start writing a script. Check out the link in the description for more information.
But compared to the synthetic wood table we’ve been using before, how does it sound?
The synthetic wood table we usually use seems to bring out the spring ping a lot more,
and leave some of the low end out. This does make a lot of sense because the synthetic wood table
is almost twice as thick, and the flexispots thinner surface would allow for resonating
of the board sound. In order to mitigate this, we use deskmats.
These are large sheets of cloth like material that serve as external sound dampening, cutting
the link between your table and your keyboard. This can help isolate the sound of your keyboard,
but certain deskmats vary in material and thickness and can affect sound on their own.
Let's listen to the effect of multiple deskmats, and compare it to no deskmat at all.
So going from no deskmat to 1 deskmat had a pretty big change.
It removed the lower frequencies of the board resonating through the wood.
Going from one deskmat to multiple however, didn’t really have a change at all,
since the material of just one deskmat is enough to isolate the board already. It did get slightly
slightly more muted, but it was very hard for me to tell and it wasn’t picked up by the microphone.
Possibly the largest influencer of sound is your microphone type and placement.
This will determine what frequencies of the board are picked up the best, and a mic position
too close or too far can lead to an incorrect interpretation of the actual sound of a board.
Let’s listen to what the mode would sound like on 3 different mics at 3 different distances.
This one actually surprised me. The blue yeti close up seems to bring out both the ping
and the lower frequencies, while putting it further away seems to remove the ping completely and leave only the middle frequencies. The iphone close up sounds really dull,
and alright, but still somewhat low quality at a medium distance,
then goes back to being dull at a far distance. The camera mic close up sounds really clacky,
and somewhat like the yeti close up, while at a medium distance the lower frequencies come back,
and go away again at a further distance. And remember that the only thing being
changed here is the microphone! And yet just this one outside factor being
changed is still drastically affecting what the board sounds like to you.
So I’m not testing all this to say that sound tests are useless. I’m not trying to say that
at all. My point is that sound tests can only be considered from a semi scientific viewpoint
when their purpose is relativity. This is why in our switch reviews, I always aim to compare the
switch being reviewed with another switch, so you get some sort of idea of how each compares to each
other. So instead of blindly trying to interpolate how a switch would sound in your keyboard,
you get to hear 2 in the same configuration, which is a very helpful frame of reference.
But when sound tests aren’t used to compare two things and thus don’t give you an adequate frame
of reference, they really only go as far as to give a vague idea of a board’s sound profile,
but really are more or less just entertainment. This is why we aim to provide the best audio
quality and keep the setup as consistent as possible, so we minimize the factors that
differ videos from real life sound. But that's all anyone can ever do. Minimize.
It's simply not going to be possible to get the real experience of a board’s sound and
feel without using it in person, and also in your own typing environment.
And the factors we tested today are not even close to covering the ones I listed, let alone all the
possible factors that have a noticeable effect. So the moral is that, if you haven’t been in this
hobby for very long, take sound tests with a grain of salt, or maybe a few thousand.
Because even if you have the exact same board, in the exact same configuration,
it can still sound dramatically different because of the things we talked about today.
And that's all I have for you today. Thanks for watching this episode of nearlucid.
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