The Key-Count Rule
mid1 splits its keyboard guides by key count, because 25, 49, 61 and 88 keys are different instruments for different desks, and a "best MIDI keyboard" list that mixes them is comparing a laptop bag to a piano.
A 25-key controller is a travel and production tool that sacrifices range for a spot on a crowded desk. An 88-key weighted controller is trying to feel like a piano and is judged on action, not portability. Ranking them against each other tells you nothing useful, so every keyboard guide names its key count in the title and only compares controllers built for the same footprint.
The Three-Tier Rule
Every buying guide on mid1 names exactly three picks: a budget pick, a best-value pick and a premium pick, and the tiers are relative to that category rather than fixed dollar amounts.
A budget 25-key controller and a budget 88-key controller sit at very different prices. Tiers describe where a product sits inside its own category, so the budget pick is the cheapest thing we would still tell a friend to buy, the best-value pick is what most people should actually get, and the premium pick is the point where more money stops buying much more product. If a category has no honest trio, we do not publish a guide for it.
The Typical-Price Test
A discount only counts as a real sale on mid1 when the current price is below the median of our own tracked price snapshots, not when it is below the manufacturer list price.
List price is close to meaningless on most marketplace listings: items sit permanently at "20% off" a number nobody ever paid. We compare against the median of the prices we have actually recorded for that product, so a sale badge means the thing is genuinely cheaper than it usually is. Where Amazon shows its own strikethrough we display that figure attributed to Amazon, and it never becomes the typical price. A tracked low needs the price to have moved: we flag one only when we have recorded at least three different prices for that product and the current price is below every other price on our record, so a price that has never changed is never called a low.
The Weekly Check
mid1 runs its own price snapshot once a week and stores the result, so every price on the site carries the date it was observed.
The weekly series begins the week mid1 launched. Each run covers most of the tracked catalog rather than all of it, so a product sometimes carries the date of the run before. Once an observation falls more than ten days behind the latest run it loses its sale and tracked-low badges and is shown with its date instead, because a badge is only as fresh as the observation behind it. Snapshots are committed to the site as data rather than fetched at page load, so the history survives if an upstream source disappears. Every price on the site is a dated observation, not a live quote, and the retailer link always carries the true current number.
The Buy-Box Rule
A product only stays listed on mid1 while it has a live buy box from the retailer, so gear that quietly becomes third-party-only or unbuyable is pulled instead of left up.
Dead affiliate listings are the standard failure mode of recommendation sites. We treat the missing buy box, not the page returning an error, as the signal, because an unbuyable listing usually still returns a perfectly healthy page. Items that fail the check go to a replacement worklist rather than staying in a guide.
The Three-Strike Listing Check
mid1 only removes a product as dead after its listing fails three separate checks, because single failures are usually transient.
One failed request is noise: retailers rate-limit, and pages flap. Three confirmed failures is a removed product. This keeps the catalog from churning on temporary errors while still clearing genuinely dead listings.
No Paid Placement
No manufacturer can pay for a pick, a position or a rating on mid1; the only money the site makes is affiliate commission on links a reader chooses to click.
Commission rates differ between products, so the incentive to bias a ranking is real. The rule is simply that rankings are set before commissions are considered, and a pick is never changed because of what it pays. Affiliate disclosure appears on every page that carries a link.
One Named Reviewer
Every review, rating and verdict on mid1 is written by one named person, Elan Harpaz, rather than published under an anonymous house byline.
Ratings are given on a 1 to 10 scale and represent a single editorial verdict, not an average of many reviewers. Star ratings that come from a retailer listing are always labelled as the retailer's, shown separately, and deliberately kept out of our structured data.