In my review, I wrote of the WASD v2 mechanical keyboard:
If I ever end up back in an office environment, I'll order one for there and make sure to have the o-ring dampeners installed at the factory to spare me the hassle.
Well, I did end up back in an office environment, and I packed the first one of these I bought along with me on my first day back.
I asked around with some people in my pod and nobody felt like it sounded too loud. It helps that my boss has an undampened Kinesis, and that the neighboring pods have a few people with mechanical keyboards.
I came home from that first day, turned my Apple Wireless Keyboard on, began to type, and it was a pretty unsettling experience. After about six weeks of steady use of the WASD, the rubber dome keyboard just felt off. I eventually settled back in, but it took me a little while.
After a few days of dealing with that sense of shear, I did exactly what I said I would: I ordered a new one to the same specs and had the dampening o-rings installed at the factory. The one gripe I have is that I ordered the custom Mac function keycaps (the kind that show you what each key does on a Mac), but WASD chose not to read my mind and pre-install them with o-rings as well. So it took about five minutes with the keycap removal tool and a mechanical pencil tip to pry off the keycaps, remove the o-rings, re-install the o-rings on my new keycaps, and install the keycaps.
One other observation: A neighbor has a very similar keyboard with Cherry MX Red switches (but with no dampeners). To our ears, the dampened Cherry Brown sounded about as loud as the undampened Cherry Red.
Anyhow, how much do I like this keyboard? Enough that I've got one for home and one for office.