Computers

Keyboards ranked by how loud they are through an apartment wall

We typed the same paragraph on nine keyboards with a meter in the next room.

By Hazel Kirkbride · July 29, 2026

I live in the top half of a 1908 two-family in Florence, and the wall between my desk and my roommate's bedroom is plaster over lath with a door in it that has never closed right. Ines has been living behind that wall for two years. She has opinions about keyboards now, and none of them are the opinions keyboard people have.

So we ran a test. Nine keyboards, one paragraph, one meter, one wall.

How the test worked

The sound meter sat on a kitchen chair in Ines's room, six feet back from the shared wall, with the door shut. The noise floor in that room is 31.2 dB, almost all of it the refrigerator on the other side of the kitchen wall. Anything at 32 is basically silence with a rumor of typing in it.

On every keyboard I typed the same paragraph three times at about 70 words a minute, no corrections. The paragraph is 137 words out of a 1974 Hampshire County culvert survey, which I picked because it has no punctuation worth pausing over and because reading it three times in a row is its own kind of penance. Same chair, same wooden desk, no mat under any of them. The number below each keyboard is the average across the three passes, followed by the loudest single reading.

Rankings run quietest to loudest.

1. HHKB Professional Hybrid Type-S

32.4 dB average, 33.8 dB peak.

Barely above the refrigerator. Ines came out halfway through the run to ask whether I had started yet. The Type-S is the silenced version of Topre's dome and spring arrangement, and the keys go down into something padded and come back up without announcing it. If you share a wall with someone who works nights, this is the answer and the argument is over.

The costs are real. It is about $300, the layout throws out the arrow keys and the function row, and the control key sits where your caps lock has been your entire life. I spent four days hitting the wrong thing.

2. Logitech K380

33.1 dB average, 34.6 dB peak.

A flat scissor board with round keycaps, $39, the kind of thing that gets bought three at a time for a shared office. It is quiet because there is nothing in it to make noise. The keys have about a millimeter and a half of travel and it flexes if you type hard. Nobody is going to love it. Nobody in the next room hears it either.

3. Apple Magic Keyboard

33.6 dB average, 35.0 dB peak.

Quieter than it feels, because the sound it makes is a short high tick with nothing behind it, and plaster eats that. At the desk it reads as louder than the K380. Through the wall it is a hair softer. The travel is short enough that I bottom out on every key and my hands know it by four in the afternoon, and $99 is a lot for a keyboard you cannot open or fix.

4. Keychron K8 Pro with silent switches

33.9 dB average, 35.5 dB peak.

Silent linear switches on a proper mechanical board, about $109, and the first one in this list I would use every day by choice. Through the wall it reads as a soft irregular patter, like light rain on a car roof. Ines heard it and did not care. The spacebar is the loudest part by a good margin, which is true of almost every board here.

5. Logitech MX Keys S

35.2 dB average, 37.4 dB peak.

The office standard, $109, and probably the board you already have. Slightly hollow, slightly plasticky, and the sound through the wall has a woody knock to it that the numbers do not capture. Fine at two in the afternoon. Noticeable at eleven at night, which is a distinction the meter cannot make and a roommate can.

6. Keychron K2 with brown switches

36.8 dB average, 39.1 dB peak.

Same family as the board at number four, tactile switches instead of silent ones, aluminum frame instead of plastic, and the aluminum is the problem. It rings. Every keystroke has a faint metallic tail on it, and the tail is the part that gets through plaster. Ines described it as "someone dropping very small forks."

7. Das Keyboard 4 Professional

41.3 dB average, 45.2 dB peak.

Cherry MX Browns, a heavy plastic case, no foam and no dampening anywhere. It sounds great from where I sit. Through the wall it is a clear steady clatter that you can count keystrokes in. This is the board I was using before the test started, and this is the board Ines has been complaining about for two years, and I am putting that in print because she asked me to.

8. Corsair K70 with Cherry MX Blue

45.0 dB average, 49.7 dB peak.

Clicky switches with a plastic click mechanism in every one, on an aluminum top plate that does the click no favors. The K70 made it through the wall, through the closed door, and down the stairs to the first floor. Our downstairs neighbor Bev Cutliffe, who has never once mentioned noise in two years, asked what I was doing on Tuesday.

9. Unicomp New Model M

48.6 dB average, 53.9 dB peak.

A current keyboard built on the 1985 design, with a spring in each key that buckles and bangs against the housing on the way down. Four and a half pounds of gray plastic. It is genuinely wonderful to type on, and at $109 it is cheaper than half the boards above it.

It is also 17 dB over the room floor from six feet away on the far side of a wall, which is somewhere between a running dishwasher and a person talking. Ines lasted forty seconds into the first pass, opened the door, and stood there. I finished the three passes because the test required it. We have agreed the Unicomp lives in the closet.

Two things the numbers miss

Typing style matters more than the keyboard does past a point. I ran the Das again deliberately typing soft and got 38.1 dB, which would have moved it up two places. You cannot type soft for eight hours.

And the desk is half the instrument. I put the K70 on a folded bath towel and lost 3.2 dB, more than the gap between most of the boards on this list. A $12 desk mat is a cheaper fix than a $109 keyboard, and if you are reading this because someone in your apartment has been giving you a look, start there.