Well, this is certainly one of the reviews of all time. Without much more to it, I present a deep dive on the Tecsee Honey Peach switches - the first switches to feature a stem with a center pole made entirely of metal.
As always, thank you for the continued readership week in and out. We’re only a few weeks away from the website’s 4th birthday so be on the lookout for the associated Meta Update that will come alongside it!
Based on the review, extremely inconsistent/messy sound of these aside, I could see a market for metal-stemmed switches for oddball builds. For example, a more consistent implementation could sound and feel interesting in a thick plastic plate.
I’d say if someone is interested in this metal stem concept and wants to try something a bit more consistent, they could check out WS Jade switches mentioned in the Background section of the review. They have about as much in common with the NK_ Creams+ mentioned in the comparison section as they do the Honey Peaches, but aren’t identical to either.
The entire stem pole isn’t metal like the Honey Peaches, but there are metal inserts embedded in both the stem pole and housing tube. The inserts aren’t modular like they are with the Creams+, but that also makes them a lot more reliably consistent.
It looks to me like part of what make the Tecsees so inconsistent is how they’ve mated the plastic and metal, where a joint between them is responsible for maintaining the 90 degree angle of the pole to the rest of the stem. Anything not perfect in that joint will result in a less than ideal switch overall. Jades, on the other hand, have the stem pole molded in one piece of plastic like any other MX-pattern switch, and have the metal parts embedded in that plastic.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the Jades for their almost “half-silent” sound profile of loud bottom-outs and quiet top-outs - but I think they also prove that adding metal haptic and acoustic elements to plastic switches can be done in a reliable and consistent way. Instead of “clackity-clackity-clackity”, they just go “clack clack clack”, making one emphatic sound per character input. If that sound quality piques your interest, I can easily recommend the Jades as they’re otherwise conventionally great linears.
I hope more companies keep playing around with this sort of thing.
