Keychron K8 Pro Mechanical Keyboard Review

Misleading marketing in mechanical keyboards seems to be well the norm, haha. But yeah seems that there was so much hype around the Panda name everyone and their grandmother co-opted it.

Agreed! Gateron Browns do seem to measure with a bit more return force than the MXes which could be the explanation for why I find them snappier, but neither is really all that great in terms of tactility.

Again though they used an SM57 which is hardly flat voicing. I wonder whether the dB reads just didn't compensate for frequency distribution. Thanks for ratifying, more keen to try the Kangaroos now.

 

Plus you'll have to account for position on the board. Sounds like it'll be a pain in the bunghole but could be really interesting!

 

Took advantage of Prime Day to get a 35 piece set of Baby Kangaroos to test. I'm still adjusting to the actuation force, but I do like that I can feel the bump now. Much more tactile, without any extra noise over the Keychron Pro Browns that came with the keyboard. Slightly more damped sound which makes me hear the plastic a tiny bit more, but overall a very nice character. I notice my spacebar a whole lot more now for some reason, so I have some bits of foam coming in to see if I can damp it just a tiny bit more.

At any rate, this is the first time I bothered to swap out switches after using some version of browns for the last 5 years. Happy I finally did. And I am going to stop reading about other switches so I don't go down a switch rolling hole (never did with tubes, so probably safe).

 

I'd told this story in my now-deleted introduction post (got lost in the hack a while back) but I actually had ridden off into the sunset with respect to audio gear some few years ago before making a friend in the local fountain pen circles who let me try his Cypher Labs Theorem 720 > Lake People G109A (the same one I've gotten to borrow several times now) > Sennheiser HD650 at a random pen meet.

Compared to the FiiO E10 > AKG K550 stack I was running at the time it just blew my mind how *there* and nuanced everything sounded, and I started thinking that hey yeah, maybe DACs do make a difference after all. This was a couple of years before I signed up here on SBAF I think, and it's just been a steady pace of falling deeper down the rabbit hole of audio playback.

Anyway this same friend also happens to be into knives, cameras, and more pertinently now keyboards. Nice ones. Very recently we got around to chatting about keyboards and he mentioned that he had a few that just happened to be taking up closet space and would I like to try one out?

You can guess what happened next.

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Currently have an Owlabs Mr Suit in on loan, currently decked out in special-order unlubed and unfilmed Durock T1s with 78g springs and with Infinikey Vanir PBT keycaps which I swear are the most beautiful forest green and sound remarkable paired with the polycarb plate on this board. The typeface used is a bit too rounded and cartoony for me, I'm a fan of thinner-weight fonts, but it's REALLY hard not to love the texture of these things and just how vibrant the colours are.

To serve as a baseline here's the lightly modded Keychron Q1 I've been running for a while now: Keychron Q1_mod.wav

And here's the Mr Suit loaner board from the same distance and gain setting: Owlabs Mr Suit.wav

The microphone I used (an sE Electronics V7) is far from being any sort of ideal for making keyboard sound tests since it's a supercardioid dynamic mic; it gets most of the tone right but doesn't quite fully extend into the bottom octave and loses a lot of the nuances you can hear from these boards in person; the Mr Suit has a really beautiful sort of velvety sonic texture thing going on when pressing down on the keys, likely from the Durocks here being unlubed? It's a really pretty sort of sound that makes me want to keep typing without my headphones on just so I can hear more of it.

There's also a lot of buzzing that I can catch in both recordings. Not entirely sure what the cause is because I'd had both my monitor and every RGB light within a meter of the mic switched off because I'm aware that dynamic mics are susceptible to EMI, but I only noticed the noise after exporting the above files and listening back on the tracks well after I'd packed up my own board for storage. Still, the samples seem about right in terms of portraying the relative differences between each board.

Should also point out that while I thought the Q1 heavy the Mr Suit feels like an actual bludgeoning weapon. It's not shockingly heavy, I've run into heavier at aforementioned friend's place, but it's heavy enough that I'm worried about denting my desk.

 

So a quick update. So far over the last few years I've been good about not really having much in the way of FOMO with respect to keyboards but seeing the chatter around the Gateron Baby Kangaroos made me want to pick some up haha.

Keychron Q1 sound test with the Gateron Baby Kangaroos. I might be off by a couple cm with respect to distance from the board but gain and aiming between the G and H keys with my mic are consistent so this ought be comparable to the earlier samples I'd posted. I adore the cartoonish level of clack, this is right up my alley: Keychron Q1 Baby Kangaroos.wav

More good news, the tactile sense is MUCH preferable to the stock Gateron Browns that came with the Q1. Bad news is that I got this board used and I did notice that the previous owner'd bollixed some of the hotswap sockets up, likely in the process of modding the thing. I've been tempted to replace the sockets just because knowing there're bends in the contacts itch at the back of my mind and frustrate me.

Most of the sockets are fine, but because the pins on the Baby Kangaroos are just *slightly* shorter than the stock ones I can't seem to get them to work with the one socket and I'm gonna either have to replace the socket or push the contacts inwards so they work with the dumb Baby Kangaroos (it's just the "B" key that doesn't work at this point-- I'm typing this out on the Mr Suit I'm borrowing).

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Also consider Emogogo Tactiles.

U4T adjacent with a deeper sound. Custom molds and materials.
Progressive spring, long pole, D-shaped bump with no pre-travel and some post travel.

The most useful coverage is here, containing information other than sound recordings: