Aluminium Vs Steel Sound Test

Learning and discussion
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Both boards are mechmini2’s with lubed retooled blacks (and 63.5g sprit springs) - lubed with 104 and 106 as always.

Here’s the test:

The cyan contains a fixed layout aluminium plate, the purple a fixed layout steel plate. Both 1.5mm.

The sound is relatively evident - on the feel the steel is more rigid, and has less variance in flex across the plate.

If anyone was expecting to hear to telltale ping of steel I did some testing there with existing boards and it’s notable primarily in low profile trays. The combination of high profile (in this case in small part the polycarb base on the board) and top mount does an admirable job of removing it.

I wanted to show the sound at it’s best. In my experience a lot write off steel immediately thanks to a perception of ping.

Also - I conducted this test with PBT dye-sub DSA on both (previous tests done with one of each as was noticed by @holtenc) to eliminate that as a differentiator.

Science!

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Lol. Do you think PBT vs ABS made a difference? Personally I think ABS makes higher clicky clack than PBT… But I think everyone seems to have differing opinions.

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To be honest, I still can’t really tell, I think I’ll have to build two back up with original plates and retooled with the cap as the delta. I’d also suspect it may make a bigger difference with the universal plates (given there’s more space for the sound to develop), but could be the inverse.

FML. Why do you do this to me.

Not yet though. Need to build something that isn’t a mm2. After, erm. One last mm2 build…

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Haha don’t do it man. If you can’t tell a difference then it’s probably so negligible it definitely won’t get picked up on a mic. At most take one board and put half ABS and half PBT and see if your ears can discern a difference there.

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