How 'thock' became an acoustic spec, not an accident

The word used to describe an outcome. A builder would finish a tray mount, drop in a set of switches they'd spent two hours lubing with a 1mm brush, and discover — sometimes — that the board they'd built sounded the way the forum threads had promised. The sound was the reward, and the reward wasn't guaranteed. A decade later the language has flipped. "Thock" isn't what a well-built keyboard happens to do anymore; it's what a $150 prebuilt is engineered to do at the factory, before a single enthusiast touches it.

From discovery to specification

In 2016 a thocky board was a sentence with caveats. Owners described the lube job, the case foam they'd improvised from craft felt, the plate material they'd swapped after a week of A/B testing. The sound was downstream of decisions a builder made by hand, in private, and the relationship between any one decision and the final acoustic profile was something the hobby was still working out in long forum threads. Two builders with nominally identical parts lists would end up with audibly different boards, and the gap between them was where the craft lived.

The vendor pitches of the era reflected that. Group-buy interest checks led with the case design, the plate options, the colorway. Sound was implied — the way a high-end speaker brand implies fidelity — but the brand didn't underwrite it. The builder did. Boards shipped, the builder did the work, and the sound was the builder's outcome to chase.

In 2026 the same pitch leads with the acoustics. The product page for a midweight prebuilt now itemizes the dampening stack, names the switches as factory-lubed by SKU, calls out the plate material and the gasket geometry by spec, and — increasingly — hosts a sound test in the page header before the photography of the case finishes loading. The vendor is asserting the acoustic result, not implying it. That's an industrial shift, not a marketing one. The vendor can only assert what the factory can deliver consistently.

The four-layer stack went standard

Four moves stacked on top of each other to make that assertion defensible.

The first is at the switch. Factory lubing went from a sometimes-it's-there, sometimes-it's-uneven curiosity to a quality bar that mid-tier brands now compete on. The thock lubing-101 guide covers what hand-lubing buys a builder; what changed in the last two years is how much of that gap factory work now closes. Brands that built their reputation on the discipline — most visibly HMX, whose Cloud deep-dive argues that HMX's edge isn't material novelty but rather the boring industrial answer of "do the lubing well, at volume, every time" — are now what readers recommend by default for a builder who doesn't want to lube. The Gateron Oil King is the linear-sound exhibit B: its signature acoustic profile is an engineered outcome of a specific factory-lube viscosity matched to a specific housing tolerance, not a happy accident that hobbyists discovered after the fact. The Oil King deep-dive walks through how deliberate that pairing is. Even Cherry, the incumbent whose decade-long reputation for dry, scratchy stock switches had become a running joke, shipped MX2A specifically to close the factory-lube gap — the MX2A revision piece is the clearest sign that the rest of the industry has redefined the baseline.

The second is at the plate and case interface. Gasket mount moved from a high-end custom flex into a mid-tier default, which means the plate's interaction with the case isn't being left to the builder anymore. The vendor picks the gasket material, the compression height, and the plate flex profile, and stamps a spec on it. The builder receives a sound the vendor underwrote.

The third is dampening as a stack rather than a single layer. The current generation of mid-tier prebuilts ships with a silicone pad in the bottom case, foam tape between PCB and plate, and a poron strip lining the case walls — three layers chosen for what each one absorbs. The Mode Sonnet build piece walks through what that looks like when a builder assembles it deliberately; the new thing in 2026 is that a prebuilt at half the price ships the same architecture out of the box, just with the gasket count and the plate alloy ticked down a grade.

The fourth is the keycap default. PBT doubleshot is now the keycap a mid-tier vendor ships stock. The contribution to the sound is real but is often the least-discussed: doubleshot PBT at 1.5mm wall thickness has an acoustic footprint distinct from ABS at 1.2mm, and the shift in stock keycaps is part of why prebuilts at the $150 tier sound the way they do without any keycap swap.

What changes when the win condition becomes the floor

The interesting consequence isn't that more boards sound good. It's what happens to the rest of the buying decision when the acoustic outcome is no longer the variable. A reader picking a $150 prebuilt in 2022 was effectively also picking how much modding time they were signing up for; in 2026 that's largely priced into the SKU. The decision compresses onto layout, typing feel (gasket density, plate flex, switch character), and aesthetics. That's a healthier shape for the hobby's gateway tier — readers who used to bounce off the modding step now stay, and the modders who used to differentiate on sound are now differentiating further up the stack.

The shift also reframes the customs side. A $300 custom build in 2026 isn't competing with the $150 prebuilt on whether it sounds good — both will. It's competing on whether it sounds specific. The mid-tier delivers a defensibly good thock at a defensibly low variance; the high end's pitch is that it delivers a particular thock the builder chose, which is a different value proposition. Some of the old customs market has to recompose itself around that. Not all of it will.

What we're watching

Three threads run from here.

The first is the sub-$100 tier. Most of the four-layer stack is shipping at $130–$180 now; the question is when, and from whom, it reaches $90. The bottleneck is probably the gasket mount — the others are already cheap at volume. A wired, plastic-cased gasket-mount prebuilt with factory-lubed switches and a foam stack at $99 would close the last gap in the ladder. Several Chinese OEMs are within striking distance; none has shipped one yet.

The second is whether plate and case materials become the next design lever now that switches are figured out. If the switch question is settled at the factory, the differentiation moves to the structure around it — polycarbonate plates with specified flex curves, FR4 layups, multi-layer aluminum-with- brass-insert constructions. Some of this is already happening on the customs side; what mid-tier picks up from it will tell us where the next round of acoustic competition lands.

The third is what happens to the high-end's acoustic edge if the mid-tier keeps closing the gap. A $600 group-buy custom can't sustainably sell on "sounds better than the $150 prebuilt" if the gap is small enough that a blind listener struggles to call it. The customs side has options — typing feel, fit and finish, material storytelling, the social contract of a group buy — and most of them are real value. But the marketing line that customs sound better will have to retire, and what replaces it isn't fully written yet.

The trend that runs under all three is the same one: acoustics moved from a builder's outcome to a vendor's spec, and once something becomes a spec the competition shifts to whatever isn't specced yet. The Trends Tracker will watch which lever the industry picks up next.