How do silenced Topres work?

[bhchiang]

I'm new to the community. I recently bought my first Topre board (Realforce R2 PFU Limited), which is silenced (I also tried the regular, non-silenced R2 with variable weighting).

I'm curious about how the silencing mechanism works - what is physically different about the switches that results in the silencing?

Any links / thoughts would be appreciated.

One link I saw: https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=16610.

[Tactile]

There's a ring of soft material added to the slider so that on the upstroke this softer material makes contact instead of a hard plastic-to-plastic impact. In this illustration this softer material is shown in green.

[didjamatic]

Quietly.

[sublyme]

While the silencing rings make it nicer to type on its not really what I would call silenced. Not close to anything like what you would get with mx slient blacks.

[Riverman]

I have both silent Topre and silent MX black keyboards, and they're pretty similar, although the MX black is probably a little quieter.  Neither one is exactly silent, but for mechanical keyboards, they're both pretty quiet.