How to make a cheap keyboard sound better

Cheap keyboards sound cheap for identifiable reasons, and most of those reasons are fixable in an evening for very little money.

What follows is ordered by how much the sound actually changes per hour of work — based on doing all of it to the boards tested on this site — rather than by how often each modification gets recommended.

1. Tune the stabilisers

Time: 40 minutes. Cost: a few dollars of grease. Change: large.

This is first by a wide margin and it is not close. A ticking stabiliser is a distinct sound arriving just after the keypress, and your ear separates it out rather than blending it in — so removing it changes the character of the board far more than the 1.5 to 2.5 dB it removes from the meter.

The full method is in why your space bar rattles. If you do one thing from this page, do this one.

2. Add case foam

Time: 20 minutes. Cost: $5 to $10, or free if you have packing foam. Change: large on hollow boards, small on dense ones.

Cheap boards sound hollow because they are hollow. There is a large empty volume between the PCB and the case bottom, and it resonates like any other box.

Cutting a piece of foam to fit that space removes the resonance. Poron or EVA foam is ideal; the foam your keyboard shipped in works fine.

The effect depends entirely on how much empty space there was to begin with. On a thin-cased 60% it is transformative. On the Tessera TKL, which already has five internal layers, there is nothing left to fix.

3. The tape mod

Time: 15 minutes. Cost: free. Change: moderate, and easily undone.

Two to four layers of masking tape on the underside of the PCB. It damps board flex and usually deepens the pitch noticeably.

It is free, completely reversible, and the most-recommended modification in the hobby for good reason. Add one layer at a time and listen — more is not automatically better, and past about four layers most boards stop changing.

Avoid covering exposed contacts or the USB daughterboard connector.

4. Change the keycaps

Time: 10 minutes. Cost: $25 to $60. Change: moderate to large, and immediate.

Keycaps affect sound more than most people expect. Thin ABS caps are light and resonate at a higher pitch; thick PBT caps are heavier and sound deeper and more solid.

Profile matters too — a taller profile like Cherry or MDA encloses more air above the switch than a low flat profile does, which lowers the pitch.

This is the only item on this list that also changes how the board looks and feels, which is either a bonus or a distraction depending on your budget.

5. Lube the switches

Time: three to five hours for a full board. Cost: $10 of lubricant plus a switch opener. Change: large for feel, small for sound.

Hand-lubing every switch transforms how a board feels — scratchiness disappears, travel becomes uniform, and cheap linears start behaving like expensive ones.

For sound it is worth roughly 1 dB, which is much less than the time investment suggests. Do it because you want the feel, not because you want the sound.

If your board is not hot-swap this is not available to you without desoldering, which puts it out of reach for most people.

Two things that usually disappoint

Plate foam. A layer of foam between the plate and the PCB. It deadens the sound, and “deadened” is not the same as “improved” — plenty of people fit it, dislike the muted result, and remove it. Try case foam first, and treat plate foam as a taste experiment rather than an upgrade.

O-rings. Small rubber rings on the switch stems that cushion the bottom-out. They do reduce noise, and they change the typing feel significantly by shortening the travel and making it feel spongy. Worth trying if a board’s bottom-out is genuinely harsh — they helped on the Meridian 96 — but they are a feel modification with a sound side effect, not the reverse.

What order to do it in

Stabilisers, then case foam, then tape. That is under an hour and a half in total, costs almost nothing, and gets you most of the available improvement.

Everything beyond that has diminishing returns, and at some point the honest answer is that you have reached the limit of the case you are working with. A $22 board with perfect stabilisers still sounds like a $22 board — better than it did, and still recognisably itself.