Picking Atlas's switches with thock

Last week we committed to Kailh Choc v2 for Atlas. That settled the family. It didn’t settle the switch. Sixteen Choc v2 variants ship today, from the clicky Hide Mountain to the silent Deep Sea Whale to the ultra-short-travel Saker. The group buy can stock three, maybe four. Which ones?

YouTube reviews are the better place to hear how a switch sounds in someone’s build. Go watch a few. YouTube doesn’t give you fast A/B across a family, switches plotted on the same spectrum axes for direct comparison, or “what would this sound like with foam, or from across the room”. We built a tool for that side.

thock is a browser app. Record a switch into your microphone, get a spectrum fingerprint averaged across the samples, and play the whole library back as if you were typing prose. Static site, runs locally, recordings stay on your machine. Source on GitHub.

Open thock →

In the app: open library, hit + all on the Choc v2 family, then import selected. Audition them. Or watch a YouTube review for the candidates that catch your ear; that's where the real-build sound lives.

Vote on the group buy stock

Pick up to three Choc v2 switches. We’ll fold the totals into the stock decision.

What’s in the library

19 switches, all recorded on the same microphone, in the same room, at the same gain.

• 16 Kailh Choc v2: every variant in the Keebart tester pack. The standard Reds and Blues, the Four Seasons line (Spring linear, Summer clicky, Autumn clicky, Winter tactile), the Storm series (Black Cloud, White Rain, Hide Mountain), the Deep Sea silent trio (Pink Island, Islet, Whale), Saker ultra-short-travel, Ice Cream, Purple Swallowtail, Brown.
• 3 Kailh Choc v1: Ambients Twilight and Nocturnal (silent linears), and Sunset (tactile). Atlas’s hotswap sockets accept v1 too, but the stems are different, so dropping in v1 switches locks you to v1-only keycap sets while Atlas is built around the v2 / MX-stem shelf. The v1 reference still earns its keep: hearing what’s different sharpens what you’re gaining.

Every entry ships with type, actuation force, and pre-travel-to-bottom-out, from manufacturer datasheets and Keebio’s comparison work. The UI dot colour matches the physical stem.

Three ways to listen

1. Fingerprint: averaged smoothed spectrum across all samples of a switch. Pick another switch and the curve redraws on the same axes for direct comparison. The clicky vs. tactile vs. linear character lives in the upper-mid bump.
2. Typist: plays the selected switch at a configurable WPM as if you were typing prose. Bundled passages auto-cycle. Click another switch and the typist hot-swaps mid-sentence so you can A/B without stopping.
3. Environment: a dropdown that colours the playback through a 5-stage filter chain. gasket build and foam-lined warm the switch the way a custom case would. across desk and across room muffle it by distance. There’s an underwater preset too, because we could. Treat it as a toy; the values are eyeballed, not engineering. Flipping between presets shifts the character in a recognisable way.

Contributing recordings

Library is Choc-heavy because that’s what we own. Switches off the Choc shelf welcome, especially MX, Kailh Butterfly, or low-profile oddballs. Decent mic, quiet room, switch tester so the build doesn’t colour the sound. Contribution guide. Email a zip or open a PR.