The thing, I’ve complained about in my review of the Tesoro Durandal G1N keyboard was the noise. It was especially disturbing late night, when I was still working on my PC and my wife wanted to sleep ;). To solve this problem I’ve decided to reduce the noise of my keyboard by applying sound dampeners - a special soft rubber O-rings that are installed on every keycap stem.
O-rings
After some searching I’ve found that good quality O-rings can be bought from the WASD Keyboards company. This is an American store, but the shipping cost, even for European clients, is quite low - sending it by ‘USPS First-Class International’ (normal envelope) costs around $7 and it takes about 10 days to ship.
As for today the shop offers two types of O-rings:
40A-L (0.2mm Reduction) Red40A-R (0.4mm Reduction) Blue
I’ve bought the 40A-L red ones, because they reduce the noise of the keyboard with only minimal impact on the writing experience. Right now I’ve been using them for more than a month and I’m really happy with the effect. When I hit the key the sound isn’t so “plastic” as before and it’s much more deaden. Still I can easily feel the moment when the key switch has been activated.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test the blue one (40A-R - 0.4mm reduction), so I can’t write about the differences between them.
Installation
O-rings installation is a bit painful, because you have to remove every keycap, put the O-ring into the stem and then put it back into keyboard. To see how to do it properly I recommend you to watch this short movie created by WASD company. It took me about one hour to install them on all stems. To pull out the keycap I’ve used two thin wires, that I put on the opposite sides of the keycap and then pull them up. After 10 keys you can do it without thinking ;)
Final words
If you like your mechanical keyboard, but you think it’s too loud, you should use those O-rings and probably you will be happy with the result - at least I’m.
