At the end of every review he does a typing test, and for the last few years at least I think the mic has been in more or less the same kind of position and they've been recorded in the same room. You still have to apply a pinch of salt because I don't know if there's been significant differences in audio level normalisation/compression/EQ, but it would give you a more representative idea of what to expect.

can't agree more with this.

I have the novelkey creams for example, and they sound nothing like in the sound representation.

People forget how much the plate, material of the keyboard etc vary the sound.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=25572.0

brick and mortar thing is real. microcenter's basically it for physical. novelkeys and kbdfans sell $8 switch tester packs with ~10 switches each, not a store but at least you feel them before committing.

EDIT: now it's working, don't know why it repeatedly wasn't.

Where I start to break out the scepticism is when people start talking about how much more productive they are because of their fancy keyboard, or how important exactly the right keyboard is to productivity.

That's mostly nonsense.

I've got valuable work done in a whole variety of more and less ideal/noisy/comfortable/uncomfortable environments on a 13 inch laptop using its built-in keyboard.

The primary driver that makes you productive or non-productive is your motivation. If you want to get it done you'll get it done. To a very large extent, everything else is incremental. Multiple monitors, fancy keyboard, cool mouse, ergonomic chair, whatever. They're nice, and they do help a bit. But, fundamentally, what really gets things over the line is desire, motivation.

Whereas a lot of this work adjacent stuff is a form of procrastination.

I've gone through a similar experience with musical instruments and studio gear, versus actual music creation. At some point you just have to stop tinkering and start making music, and what I've realised is that the only item I have available to me at almost all times to do that is my laptop, so maybe I should focus on working in the box instead of on acquiring more hardware.

There's also "Vintage Office" which has "Mechanical Keyboard"[3].

Both have a variety of other ambiences that could fill out "typing room" (especially if you made a multi-generator.)

But yeah, it could do with a bit more variety of "office" and "keyboard" generators.

[0] I dislike the new app's UI/UX, it doesn't support multi-generators, and there's no easy way to download all the generators you have access to. (You also have to pay again for lifetime access but that I'm fine with.)

[1] "thock"

[2] "clatter"

[3] kind of a watery thock?

Unicomp was outright broken, a single file mapped to every key, which is why it sounded very wrong. It now uses the bucklespring recording from the Model M entry, which is actually authentic because Unicomp builds these on the original IBM tooling. Both fixes are live now.