Make Your Choice!

From time to time we get emails from you asking about the various options that you will able to choose from. In order to answer your questions properly we've added a new section to our site titled Make Your Choice. You're welcome to check it out to see the details for yourself.

Make Your Choice

Recording the audio samples for the 5 switch types was an especially time-consuming part of creating this section. As usual, we were serious about the details and quality so much so that I've asked my buddy Dömötör Gyimesi, founder and leader of Dreamgrave to help record these samples in their rehearsal room.

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Recording switch sound
Recording the sweet sound of mechanical switches

To make matters even more complex the continuous typing recording was created by me typing "ultimatehackingkeyboard" using every one of the 5 switch types. In practice, this was done by swapping the relevant 17 switches 4 times and rerecording the samples every time. Unlike all the other switches of this prototype these were not soldered in in order for them to be easily swappable. Still, the metal plate is quite tight and a signficiant amount of force had to be exerted in order to pop out the switches. Dömi was patient enough to wait for us so mad props to him!

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popping-out-the-switch
Trying to pop out that damn switch

As for the gory technical details, an AT4040 cardioid condenser microphone was used for the recording with a Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 USB sound card along with the Cubase 7. Dömi hand-picked the best parts of the samples. No normalization was done on the samples to preserve their qualities as much as possible.

Let me take the opportunity to thank Dreamgrave for their help! Without them the recordings couldn't have been nearly as professional as they are. Be sure to check out Dreamgrave on Bandcamp, and listen to their sweet tunes![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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9 Responses

  1. Hello! Great keyboard. Just want to know whether there would be a pointing device on the first release.

    1. Hi Amos! Thanks for the nice words! Do you mean a dedicated pointing device apart from the mouse layer? We plan to make separate trackball / trackpoint / touchpad modules eventually but probably won't be able to make it for the first release.

    1. Good point Stephen! I thought that Super is more neutral and serious looking and in the X Window system this key is actually called this way.

  2. I love the wide variety in switch choices, thanks for going the extra mile. The keyboard animations are very cool on that page as well.

  3. Where are your cool sound recordings of the different switch types? I've heard them once and a long time ago and would love to hear them again to make the right choice.
    Regards
    Tömer

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