How We Test

The methodology behind every review and recommendation on KeebWise.

The short version

Every product claim on KeebWise is labeled by its source. There are exactly three kinds of claims allowed here, and you should be able to tell them apart in any review:

1. Specification claims — from the official manufacturer page (keychron.com, epomaker.com, etc.), cross-checked for consistency. If a spec conflicts with the manufacturer's own materials, we say so.

2. Attributed community impressions — what owners and established reviewers consistently report, always credited ("owners frequently describe…"). When the community disagrees with itself, we say that too.

3. Our own testing — marked explicitly as ours, with the recording setup described. Anything without this label is not our measurement.

What "based on specifications" means

A review carrying this label has not been physically tested by us. It evaluates the board on documented specs, design decisions, and attributed community consensus — and it will contain visible placeholders where our sound test will go once we've got the unit on the bench. We don't paraphrase someone else's sound test as our own, and we don't rate boards we haven't held.

The sound-test protocol (for our own reviews)

Once physical testing starts, every sound test follows the same protocol so recordings stay comparable:

Surface: same desk mat, same wooden desk, stated in every video.
Microphone: one stated mic, fixed distance from the board, stated in every video.
Content: the same typed passage — slow typing, fast typing, and the spacebar/shift/stabs row, because stabilizers are where budget boards fall apart.
Stock first, then mods: stock recording before any modification; mods listed one by one with their cost, so you can hear what a $5 stab tune actually buys.
No post-processing: no EQ, no noise gates, no enhancement. What came off the mic is what you hear.

Prices

Prices on KeebWise are pulled from retailer feeds programmatically and refreshed — never retyped by hand, because manual prices go stale within days. Prices are shown by our own widgets with their own timestamps; we deliberately don't place prices next to certain retailer links (their programs forbid it, and we'd rather comply than guess).

What we don't do

We don't invent sound descriptions ("thocky", "marbly", "deep ping") for boards we haven't recorded.
We don't publish verdicts on units we haven't held.
We don't accept payment for coverage or verdicts. Affiliate income exists; paid placements don't.
We don't post affiliate links in Reddit comments — that gets accounts banned and subreddits poisoned against the niche.

Corrections welcome: if a spec or attribution is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed with a note in the article's changelog.

Affiliate disclosure: KeebWise may earn a commission on purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we consider worth recommending. Prices and availability change constantly — check the retailer's current price.