Along with dozens of other people, I actually like Cherry MX Browns and other lightly tactile
switches.
So when most new ones started focusing on larger and larger bumps, I couldn’t help
but feel left behind.
But with things like Box Royals and Zealio V2 being obscured by this month’s new recolor
linear, maybe there was room for something different, and that’s where the Durock Light
Tactiles come in.
At 55 cents per switch from Divinikey, which is where I bought these from, these are pretty
pricy, but hopefully they offer the same kind of advantages seen in JWK linears.
Just some logistics out of the way - I’m testing out using a new microphone.
The Behringer ECM8000 is a super cheap omnidirectional measurement microphone with a supposedly super
flat frequency response.
It should also eliminate any of the proximity effect where closer sources will sound more
bassy.
It does have a fairly high self noise that you’ll hear as static, but I think the recordings
I made still do get the point across.
Stick with me while I iterate on the process.
To capture the most amount of detail, I’m using the switches in a Vega with a polycarbonate
plate.
It’s placed on a deskmat that’s been folded to be 3 layers and the mic is on its own stand
floating about four inches from the G key.
Everything was recorded in a single session with the same settings and mic placement.
Let’s get the advertised specs out of the way.
We have a polycarbonate top, Nylon PA bottom, and a POM stem.
It is full travel at 4mm and the actuation happens at 2mm.
The bottom out weight is 67 grams.
It is factory lubed, which is a con for most people since you’d want to lube it yourself
with hopefully better consistency.
We’ll take a look at how good this lube job is later.
Let’s now take a look at what’s going on here.
The switch is 5-pin, and the pegs seem to be just about the right size, unlike Gateron
which can be a little big for most PCBs.
There’s a cutout for through-hole LEDs if anybody still does that.
Though the housing is smokey, it is transparent enough to let a good amount of light shine
through from surface mount LEDs.
The fit between the top and bottom housings is exceptionally tight with essentially no
wobble when playing with it in the hand.
Like most other Cherry style switches, it has interference issues with Cherry profile
keycaps when the switch is oriented so that the LED slot faces you.
Not a huge issue for most people buying these, but it might feel a little weird in something
like a Drop CTRL and GMK.
The plate clips are closer to what you find on Cherry switches that snap in more confidently
than something from Kailh or Gateron, which typically have one side that doesn’t fit
right.
The tops use the standard four clips like Cherry switches, so they’re easy enough
to open.
Taking a closer look at the stem, you can immediately see that it’s been lubed with
a generous amount of a thin oil.
The sides are almost fully covered except for the very top, and the front and rear have
their left and right thirds covered.
This includes the tactile legs.
The stem pole is also lubed.
When you look at the top housing, you can see a bit of that oil pooled up in the cavity.
I’m not seeing the same for the bottom housing, and there’s no lube applied to the spring
or any of the areas that the spring touches.
I didn’t expect to see this kind of coverage and this probably does work out pretty well
for using stock, but you’ll likely need to wipe all of this off before applying anything
of your own.
Looking at the shape of the stem, the tactile bump looks a little more rounded than MX Browns
and the stem pole is slightly longer.
I’m not seeing a meaningful difference between the leaves.
This does have these good looking gold plated springs.
You shouldn’t take a spring’s color as an indicator of quality, because I’ve felt
plenty that are scratchy and pingy.
These ones however seem to be pretty good.
When bashing on it in a plastic plate, I only heard a little bit of ping and no crunch.
This is a point of real improvement over at least the Cherry equivalent which I’ve found
to often have these issues.
[continued spring bashing]
Let’s now get through how these feel and sound.
I’m going to actually organize these by levels of mods starting with stock, and then
adding lube and then maybe film.
A lot of you might not care about how a switch feels stock, but as someone that goes through
a bunch of different configurations, it is important to me.
Besides, it’ll be a good point of comparison when we start modding.
Straight out of the box, the Light Tactiles have very good smoothness which is something
I’ve seen in other JWK switches.
You can definitely tell that this is much smoother than something like Gateron Browns
when pressing a single switch very slowly.
However, under real typing scenarios, I think anything smoother than Gateron switches are
very hard to distinguish.
So technically smoother, but practically doesn’t really matter.
The tactile bump is very slight, similar to Gateron or Cherry MX Browns.
The product page claims that this should have a rounder bump and I think that’s true.
It’s ever so slightly harder to distinguish when the bump starts and ends when compared
to the Brown alternatives.
It’s unclear at this point if this is attributable to the lube or the round stem, but maybe we
can get a better idea when we de-lube.
There’s a standard amount of pretravel before the bump begins but it can be slightly hard
to tell when typing at speed.
When compared to Gateron and MX Browns, the bottom out weight feels a little heavier to
me, which is good because I’ve always wished that they were lighter.
People who type with a reasonable amount of force can expect to be able to catch themselves
before the end of the keystroke.
Comparing sound stock to stock might seem unfair, but this is how I received each of
these switches, so I’m doing it anyway.
We’ll get back to other comparisons when we de-lube though.
First against Cherry.
The Cherry might have a slightly deeper pitch, but that’s masked by the ample amount of
that scratchy sound.
I think the Durock sounds tighter.
It also has less of that rattly characteristic which may be due to a whole host of factors
like tight tops or factory lube.
The Cherry switch has quite a bit more spring noise which is one of those things that you
can’t unhear once you’ve learned about it.
It’s a similar story against Gateron Browns.
The upstoke on the cheaper switches is notably more rattly, and there’s quite a bit of
spring noise when you’re listening for it.
It seems that stock-to-stock, the Durock offers a much cleaner sound.
I removed the factory lube with a q-tip by absorbing it from the stems, as well as from
the cavities on the top.
I wasn’t able to get to the bottom rails.
There was only a small difference in feel when I put these back together.
The tactile bump is ever so slightly sharper, but not much else is changed.
I couldn’t notice anything in the way of smoothness.
The sound seems to be slightly altered too.
Before de-lubing, there’s a little less noise.
Maybe if you hear it side-by-side, you’d be able to tell.
I do acknowledge that I probably wasn’t able to remove all of the lube, but having
absorbed the bulk of it, I think it’s safe to say that the lube seems to make minimal
difference.
All it really does is to get in the way of the modding that most people who are buying
a 55 cent switch will do.
Now let’s get into the interesting stuff.
How do these compare to Gateron Browns?
Gateron from Novelkeys are 24 cents per switch, and even less if you get them through less
convenient means.
Could we say that the Durock Light Tactiles are more than twice as good?
For the most part, yeah.
In a vacuum, Gateron Browns are going to feel and sound fine, but when compared directly
against even a completely stock Durock Light Tactile, a lot of its shortcomings become
more noticeable.
The size of the bump is about the same between Gateron and Durock.
I do perceive the Light Tactile to be slightly snappier, but that’s probably the spring
weight at play.
The Durock is definitely smoother, but I think this metric matters a lot less after a certain
threshold.
When typing at full speed, I couldn’t notice unpleasant scratchiness from either of these
switches.
Wobble is not something I care about directly, because I never wobble switches or even rest
my hands on the keys, but it’s significantly worse on the Gateron.
While wobble on the Gateron is not enough to notice during normal typing, I think it
might have an impact on some of the strange upstroke rattle that I only really notice
when comparing directly.
The Durock’s upstroke has a nice clean singular tone, while the Gateron has something that
reminds me of unsilenced Topre upstrokes.
Not really something I would have noticed in a vacuum, but I prefer the Durock 100%
of the time.
This last one is more preference than performance, but I like the heavier weight of the Durock
springs much better.
The Gateron are just a little too light for me.
The spring on the Durock also makes close to no crunch or ping, while the Gateron can
be noisy.
Let’s now compare against the original.
Cherry Brown has a reputation for being the worst switch ever, but I don’t think this
is necessarily true.
Cherry does seem to go through periods of really badly scratchy switches, so maybe they’ll
worsen in the future, but right now, their Browns are actually pretty smooth.
Finding loose Cherry switches can be a little difficult but mechanicalkeyboards.com has
them for 50 cents per switch if you buy at least 100.
So right off the bat, I can tell you that if you buy these loose, it’s no competition
at all.
The Durock is better in all of the aspects that I mentioned for Gateron.
In particular, the spring is so bad on some of the Cherry switches that I can actually
feel the crunch.
For the loose switch price, these are absolutely uncompetitive, but I include them because
a lot you might have some lying around from a salvage board or your last gaming keyboard
or something.
Cherry switches can also be appropriately filmed unlike the Gateron or the Durock, so
that’ll be interesting.
Speaking of which, let’s get into modding a bit, starting with lubing.
It’s the most popular, so I’m using Krytox 205g0 that I got from Novelkeys.
I’m applying a light coat to all four sides of the stem, including the tactile legs.
On the housing, I’m only applying a bit around the pole that keeps the spring in place.
For the Durock switch, I’m doing all this after removing the factory lube.
Keep in mind that this is just how I like to lube, and your application will yield different
results.
I think most people apply thicker coats.
The feel difference was minimal.
If I had to say something, the tactile bump might be slightly less noticeable, but the
stock feeling is largely retained.
There was a small but noticeable change to the sound, moving it to be a little more dampened
like lubed switches tend to be.
So it seems like lubing improves the Durocks a little bit, but the potential is greater
for Gateron and Cherry, so how do they stack up?
I gave them the same treatment except I also put in 65g springs to more closely match my
preferred weight.
The feel was largely the same, which makes sense considering that they were already past
the smoothness threshold, but the sound was noticeably improved.
Both took on more of that lubed switch sound, which also reduced some of the upstroke rattle
and the scratch I was talking about.
However, even with these improvements, I found the Light Tactiles to sound much cleaner.
It seems that you might need to do more extensive or heavier lubing on the Browns to match the
Durocks.
Now let’s take it a step further and try filming.
I’ll be using Deskey films.
Out of the three switches, I was only able to get the film onto the Cherry Brown.
Rather, I was physically able to get it onto all of them, but on the Gateron and the Durock,
the tactile bump was almost fully eliminated by it, so I don’t consider those to be viable
mods.
So with films, the Cherry gets a little more refined, further reducing that upstroke rattle.
I think even still, it’s not cleaned up enough to match the Durock.
The pitch is a little lower on the Browns on both the downstroke and the upstroke.
So I would say Cherry Browns with aftermarket springs and film is almost but not quite a
replacement for the Durock Light Tactiles, but if you’re buying them loose, the browns
might come dangerously close to the $1-a-switch mark, which is definitely not worth it.
If you already have some, and like light tactility, then that’s a valid option.
Otherwise, you should go with the Durocks.
To all four of you that I’m still speaking to, I think the Durock Light Tactiles are
a very competent switch.
It’s a little expensive, but if you consider all of the mods that you’d need to do to
existing light tactile switches, I think it’s ultimately fairly priced.
I’m very behind on the switch game, but this does seem to be one of the first premium
replacements for Brown switches to come to market.
I do feel like these are going to be somewhat unpopular and get discontinued, so maybe I’ll
stock up on them before they go the same route as PCB mount Kailh Pro Purples.