Aluminum and polycarbonate are the two most common case materials in custom keyboards.
Let’s find out how they can impact sound.
All tests done here are of the KBD8X MKII all recorded within a single session with
the same full brass plate build with stock Gateron Yellows and GMK 9009.
The microphone is a Røde NT1-A going into a Scarlett 2i2 with gain set very low at around
the 9 o'clock position.
The only post processing step was to boost the gain by 20 decibels.
My apartment is in the middle of the city so it’s noisy but hopefully it’s helpful
nevertheless.
First up is aluminum versus polycarbonate.
So that pretty much confirms what we’ve known for a bit.
Aluminum gives a denser more muted and slightly higher pitched sound while the polycarbonate
gives more of that lower pitched hollow sound.
Next are for when you might have the option to mix and match different case materials.
Let’s take a look at alu top and pc bottom.
First is the comparison to full alu.
Actually a pretty significant difference it seems.
Let’s compare that to the full pc now.
That actually seems pretty similar to me.
Maybe this means for this particular keyboard, the bottom contributes more to sound than
the top.
Let’s now compare the inverse: pc top and alu bottom.
First, against full pc.
Again these two sound pretty different.
Let’s see what it’s like against full alu.
I think this one helps me get a more nuanced understanding.
The spacebar sound seems pretty much the same, but the upstroke noise is quite a bit different.
Maybe this means that for this particular board, the bottom out sound is impacted more
by the bottom, and the return sound by the top?
It’s a little harder to draw conclusions on these mixed configurations but I think
the differences between the full alu and full pc are pretty clear.
It may be unintuitive at first, but aluminum produces dampened sounds.
Hope you found these interesting or useful.
My takeaways are just guesses and really I might be interpreting them wrong, so leave
comments down below what you think.