I personally think the current keyboard community just have way too much subjective comments that are not useful for describing the feeling of the keyboard or the sound of a keyboard. I like to collect some idea of how we could make this possible.
Typing feel:
People like to use word like “soft”, “bouncy” or “hard” when talking about typing feel, which is not very useful when comparing typing feel.
I suggest using the average maximum displacement of pressing bottom left of F keys and bottom right of J keys in two separate static pressure analysis as the base unit for typing feel.
The number will be calculated base on a plate less tray mount design 60% keyboard. The force applied to the bottom left of F and bottom right of J keys will be 65g perpendicular to the PCB using an absolute mash size of 0.5mm.
Using tray mount is for allowing relative typing feel to be compared with most entry keyboard and OEM keyboard which most of them are designed in a tray mount design. Being 60% is also for relatively easy access to the typing feel with the specification.
The choice of 65g force is used as it is a middle ground spring weight.
So when someone else designed a keyboard that person can use simulation to calculate a number using a similar parameters (0.5mm mesh, 65g force on bottom left of F and bottom right of J) and get a displacement. Then divide the calcuted value with the unit value. The larger that number is the more flex the keyboard have.
Typing sound:
So the common word used to describe sound are like “deep”, “thocky”, “clarky”, “nice” or “good”. Which are all really subjective to the listener.
For typing sound I have much less idea compare to typing feel but the rough idea is as follow.
Process the typing sound with FFT (Fast Fourier transform). This will generate a composition of the typing sound, and we can use the most dominant frequency to determine things like deepness. But I am not sure how to capture things like “thock”.
Things like “cleaness” sound can also be compared by looking at the FFT transformed sound track and how many components is used to compose the sound track.
“Goodness” of the typing sound can be compared by comparing the dissonance level of the sound. However the method to be used to calculate dissonance is something that I am not sure as I know there are multiple methods to assess calculate that.
The base unit for sound comparison I suggest using the typing sound of Gateron Yellow on a tray mount platness 60% keyboard for the similar reason as comparing typing feel. But due to large amount of variance I am not even sure is having a base unit for sound is a right choice.
So overall this is just an initial view on methods of how we could make comparisons between keyboard in a much more reliable way. I am sure three are loads of flaws in the methodology I suggest. But we will need a starting point anyway, so let’s have some discussion on how we could do this😊