Hey everyone,
I don’t have enough experience with half plates to have clearly formed an opinion and I was wondering what your experiences have been with using half plates especially when it comes to sounds. As is the general verdict, I’ve also noticed that it has noticeable impact to typing feel but I just haven’t done enough builds on the same keeb with full plate and half plates to say this or that when it comes to sound.
What has been your experiences?
I had tried aluminum and PC half-plates with a tray-mount (Tofu) and FR4 half-plate with a gasket-mount (Polaris). I found that full-plate and no-plate sounds better than half-plate. My guess is that having plate around the edge takes away from sound somehow.
Any time you remove a part or the whole of a plate, you end up with a more “plastic’y” sound (that’s the best way I can describe it) which I’m assuming is closer to a pure switch sound. Some people love it, some don’t. As you said, it’s mostly done for the typing feel. I don’t have any links offhand, but take a look on YouTube as there are many build examples. The sound samples won’t necessarily be completely accurate, but you can at least see the comparison to a full plate.