Not sure if you could recreate the feel and sound with a normal model m. It's something that usually comes up whenever the soft touch is talked about. The soft touch definitely has a different feel than a typical model m. Hard to describe but typing with a model m feels smoother. When the spring buckles, the grease takes some of the energy so its not as violent of a 'snap'. This results in the keypresses feeling smoother, while still retaining the satisfying snap of the spring buckling, just not as prominent. At least for my board, many of the keys feel slightly different from one another and have different sound profiles as well.