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The BOX Brown bird sang a beautiful song. Unfortunately it missed five notes and fell off a flight of stairs in the process.

I am typing this review on a freshly built XD60 with these BOX Brown switches. It's been uh, an interesting experience. Where to begin... Are the switches good? For what they are, yes. Very very high bump with pretty decent presence, low spring weight, smooth. They have a softer bottom out than cherries both in feel and sound, notably quieter. If I had to describe these, it's pretty close to typing on air as far as tactiles go. Now, do I like that? I honestly don't know. These switches have made me reconsider what I thought about cherry browns, and I have come to the interesting revelation that I do in fact like the slight scratchiness and how understated the bump is, it makes me feel in control. Not very satisfying to type on in comparison, but a feel that fits me nevertheless. I'll have to give the BOX Browns a longer test run to see what I truly think of them in daily use. What I can say is what I think of them in (shmup) gaming. The strength of the bump overwhelms the press a bit and lowers the sensation of how much control I have over the length of my movements. I definitely like either good ole Cherry browns or any linear better for this purpose. Now, the important part: should you buy them? At this moment, I'd say, absolutely not. There'd been a QA delay but in spite of that the spring weight is still noticeably variable between switches, the bumps are not quite consistent, actuation height is also an absolute crapshoot. I had to bin several switches because they were going off way way early. On top of that they also suffer from stem twist, the way the little nub inside pushes on the stem, combined with the looseness of the tactile stem in the BOX series switches, twists it in relation to the housing. This means unavoidable crooked keys, an aesthetic disaster. Kailh is said to be working on the twist issue but at the moment I just cannot trust their QA at all, nothing's even remotely consistent, and as a result, the BOX Blacks have moved down my list for linear options. I was slightly less interested now that I've come to appreciate the slight scratchiness of stock cherry switches anyways. All in all, extremely solid switch design that ended up being less of a holy grail to me than I thought it would be due to personal taste factors I didn't quite know of yet, tainted by very bad QA and overall bad consistency.

Reviewed by anonymous on 28 Sep 2017, 11:19 a.m. | Permalink

3 of 3 customers found this useful