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Fungivarius Beats $2 Million Stradivarius Violin
Fluffeh writes "Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the Little Ice Age which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities. Now scientists are turning to fungi to recreate some of these amazing sounding instruments."
Any time I see someone playing a violin I ask if they can play "Devil Went Down to Georgia." I usually don't get positive responses...
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Hatori Hanzo and his amazing swords.
As interesting as this is, I still think I'd rather watch Kill Bill then listen to classical music.
When I was much much younger I was purchasing a violin. While at this shop the owner had a 'cheap' Stradivarius. After I had selected the instrument I wanted (this had been going on for weeks of trying them) the owner let me hold, and play, his 'cheap' Stradivarius.
The sound that effused out of that instrument can not be put into words to hear and feel... it made the one I selected sound as if it were a cheap knockoff made of plastic. The tones could not even be compared in the same room- one was transmitted through steel cups and a string, the other was singing in front of you.
To this day that is one of the more emotional feelings of music I have ever felt.
To have that sacred sound reproduced for everyone to have access to- I don't know. It is such a beautiful instrument that, currently, only the elite can have and play (most instruments are endowed to players- on 'loan'). Should everyone have access... would it be the same?
They did it with the monster cables vs a coat hanger. You could probably just grab a $500 violin and pit it against one of these 2 million dollar ones and see. The only problem is that the cost of $2m and $500 vs $150 and a coat hanger is a much bigger monetary difference.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
There's an implication in there that it makes the wood more uniform, as if it had grown in that mini ice age, but there's no explicit mention, and all I can find at the minute are links to the same story.
Is that what it does, or is it something else to do with the acoustic properties of the wood?
Yes, it was in TFA, you would know if you had RTFA
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I imagine there might be some of that Placebo effect taking place.
They did a study a while back where they gave cheap wine to ordinary people and labeled it as expensive wine. Then they did the opposite, labeling the expensive wine as cheap wine. When people were asked which wine they liked better, guess what? they liked the "cheap" wine labeled as expensive wine the best.
While I don't doubt that the Stradivari violins may be top notch, I doubt there is that much variance between a "modern" top notch violin and what he created.
The test was with 5 violins, which consisted of one Strad, two made recently by biotech, and two made recently in the traditional way. The audience had 180 members. If you were to guess at random, you'd have a 20% chance of picking the Strad, and a 40% chance of picking out one of the biotech productions.
Some comments on the methodology:
As it happens, one of the biotech productions got 50% of the vote for the best sounding one, and 63% thought it was the Strad. That beats random guessing by a good margin, but I think this could have been done better.
Not a typewriter
This would be rather more convincing to me if the listeners were not part of a group where they could possibly confer with each other (groups of people discussing a subjective subject are likely to come to the same conclusion), and/or if the results have been shown to be consistently repeatable.
Still an interesting start, though. Definitely merits further investigation.
For example, the wood for the Stradivarius violins were transported by floating them in salt water behind the boat. And there are theories about the varnish.
The top of a violin has decorative purling trim placed in a groove carved around the outer edge. The groove is thinner than the rest of the violin, and it eventually cracks, causing the face of the violin to resonate better.
Violins that are played sound better than new violins. This can be duplicated by placing a violin in a chamber with speakers, and playing music for many, many hours.
The list goes on.
The reality is that some violins sound better than others. A Stradivarius is an instrument like any others - created by art and skill, not magic.
You want a Stradivarius? $150 gets you the downloadable version of the Garritan Personal Orchestra, which includes Stradivari, Gagliano and Guarneri violins.
They did it with the monster cables vs a coat hanger. You could probably just grab a $500 violin and pit it against one of these 2 million dollar ones and see. The only problem is that the cost of $2m and $500 vs $150 and a coat hanger is a much bigger monetary difference.
But in 10 years that monster cable will be worth the price of scrap copper and the Strad will probably go from $2M to $5M.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Give me six months and a soundboard and I'll reproduce and then better the best violin you've ever heard. Only problem is, you'll never accept the results.
You want to know why Stradivarius violins are regarded as being of unparalleled? It's because they are regarded as being unparalleled. Do you seriously think that in over 300 years of violin making that noone has yet beaten what must be by now ancient and squeaky artifacts?
This kind of "Golden Age" worship is not based on any objective assessment of quality or sound harmonics or anything else. When violins are so good that there is no realistic way to tell the difference, people need to make up myths and stick to accepted scripts in order to be accepted as "knowladgeable". It's like how in blind tastings no-one can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. Blind test it and I guarantee you that 99.99% of professional music lovers wouldn't be able to tell a Stradivarius from a cubase.
You're telling me that one guy in the 1600 managed to get his hands on all the fungus infested trees in Europe brought on by the cold and "that's" what's making these things sound so good? When people have to resort to such Grade A bullshit like that, you know they're getting desperate. I find it far more plausible that the Emperor has no clothes, and that violins can only approach a theoretical limit of sound quality before physical forces, feedback, etc become dominant over the diminishing returns.
There's no secret to Stradivarius violins. If people want to throw money away on mythical violins, let them. The ones from your local dealer will sound just as good, and in any case, violins don't have any effect on human penis size.
May the Maths Be with you!
But in 10 years that monster cable will be worth the price of scrap copper and the Strad will probably go from $2M to $5M.
That wasn't the point I was going for though. I was pointing out that a blind sound test has been done with two things, and the overall price of each test.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Hmm...It would be cool to seem them use the 'wood' to create super versions of say...a Telecaster that would be a perfect specimen in the future...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Nonetheless, this is promising work. A modern violin by the best makers is typically a $25,000 instrument, while professional players in major orchestras are expected to spend several times that for an older instrument. It's like having an extra house payment. If the quality of the modern instruments starts to rival and surpass those of lesser makers in antiquity, it will help young players immensely as well as giving speculators in such instruments a well-deserved comeuppance.
You know, the Stradivarius like most instruments in the > $10,000 range (they go way up from there) has a sound that intuitively appeals to classical players/listeners. But there are a bunch of other makers that make very distinctive instruments of equal stature. They just don't have the celebrity status of Stradivarius.
Anyway, back to your blind sound test. The paying listener, is hearing the instrument in context of a song, so its characteristics aren't obvious. There is so much that goes into a single performance that attracts lots of paying customers, a Stradivarius in the first chair isn't relevant. Who's in the first chair? What songs will they play? etc.
Also keep in mind consumers of classical music prefer the sound of a modern violin. the tension of the strings has increased meaningfully over the centuries and so has the pitch. So a Stradivarius isn't really built to handle the tension or modern strings.
While there is some interest in playing classical instruments strung with animal-based strings and tuned like they were centuries ago, it's a tiny niche.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm old enough to have seen that a breathless "the real secret to Stradivarius's violins discovered!!!" story comes up about once ever ten years, then fades away, making way for the next iteration.
When I was in high school it was that the wood he used was floated down rivers before it got to him, and therefore picked up minerals - which a modern maker claimed to have duplicated by boiling the wood in a broth made from shrimp shells. (I'm not making this up.) Earlier, it was something to do with the exact composition of the varnish. And no doubt numerous others that I never heard of.
Somehow, through it all, Strads are still prized above all other instruments, and keep increasing in value each year.
So it was the trees that created the conditions?
At the bottom of the
Did you even read the article?
In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer â" two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number â" 90 persons â" felt the tone of the fungally treated violin "Opus 58" to be the best. Truslerâ(TM)s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that "Opus 58" was actually the strad! "Opus 58" is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.
That's your blind test, right there.
I wonder who can actually tell if a strad is better than a good modern violin. Is anyone aware of this sort of testing ever happening?
Wikipedia cites this book by James Beament of Oxford as a source of blind tests and audio analysis that concludes there is no observable difference. The money quote:
there appear to be no characterizing differences between the perceived sound from well-made orthodox instruments on any age when played by a skilled player
The audiophile phenomenon is neither new nor isolated to electronics and turntables. Instruments are shiny and expensive and often rarefied; it is inevitable that a mystique emerges that lead to claims of dramatically superior audio quality. Never expect that the existence of actual evidence will dissuade the audiophiles; for every one tester there are a thousand bullshit artists and a million fools that want to believe them.
Unleash the anecdotes!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The "unparalleled" sound of Stradivarii is probably mostly the placebo effect---the Stradivarius myth.
Here's a quote from the wikipedia article:
Above all, these instruments are famous for the quality of sound they produce. However, the many blind tests from 1817 to the present (as of 2000) have never found any difference in sound between Stradivarii and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis.[2] In a particularly famous test on a BBC Radio 3 program in 1977, the great violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman and the violin expert and dealer Charles Beare tried to distinguish among the "Chaconne" Stradivarius, a 1739 Guarneri del GesÃ, an 1846 Vuillaume, and a 1976 British violin played behind a screen by a professional soloist. The two violinists were allowed to play all the instruments first. None of the listeners identified more than two of the four instruments; two of the listeners identified the 20th-century violin as the Stradivarius.[3]
The $500 violin would fail. Miserably.
source
Not only that, but next to TFA were a series of links/summaries to articles full of similar "tests" and breakthrough explanations of why Strads sound the way they do. People have been announcing new Strad secrets like people announce bigfoot sightings. IMHO, it sounded like the article was a puff piece press release to sell new fungus-treated violins.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The key element is that someone has demonstrated the effectiveness of modern instrument-making. It's a small step to use slightly different wood; I'm convinced one could make the perfect instrument from modern materials but the classical music culture is extremely resistant to tech enhancement. The perception that a wooden violin engineered to 18th century standards cannot be surpassed is so fimly embedded in the violinist culture that it may never be recognized as the myth it surely is.
There's no question, the man made great violins. However, they are not some amazing, "Oh my god you can hear a huge difference no matter what," kind of thing. High quality modern instruments. It isn't as though there haven't been blind tests and acoustic analysis done, and they haven't shown any difference between high quality current instruments and Stradivarius.
It basically is just a sort of self sustaining mythology, and thus is likely to continue. Even if we produced a violin with nanotechnology that was provably atom-for-atom identical, people would claim the Stradivarius sounded better.
You see this in other high end audio all the time. Cables would be the best example. You can, and people do, pay prices like $50,000 for speaker cables. However there is no research anywhere that shows that they do anything for sound. Yet people claim they can hear the difference, despite none being measurable, and shell out the money.
Also there's simply the status symbol. Stradivarius instruments aren't something everyone can own. As such owning one is a massive status symbol. This will remain true, no matter what replicas are produced.
So it won't matter. They'll be "the gold standard" forever, however in reality we've already matched them acoustically.
Seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to find a place in Canada that has a climate approximating that of "Little Ice Age", plant some trees, wait a few years, and then harvest Stradivarius-quality wood.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
I’m really a trumpeter...the computer thing is just to pay the bills.
Last night at a rehearsal, for an incredibly stupid reason (I mean, really, how do you walk out the door without grabbing that big yellow Pelican case?) I had to borrow an instrument.
The one I would have been playing on was owned by both Harry Glantz and Bill Vacchiano, perhaps the two greatest trumpeters ever to play with the New York Philharmonic. It’s a magical instrument, and the only C trumpet I ever want to play on again. Not perfect — it has its quirks — but it’s perfect for me.
The instrument I played on last night was barely adequate, and the mouthpiece was the polar opposite of mine.
It only took a measure or two for me to produce a sound that I considered acceptable. By the end of the first piece, only a trained musician who knows my playing very well would have been able to tell that I wasn’t using my own equipment.
Of course, I had to work a lot harder than normal to get to that point, and I still wasn’t achieving the results I consider optimal. But very, very few people reading these words would be able to tell that.
I learned that lesson decades ago at a master class with Charlie Schlueter, the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony. He wanted to demonstrate something but had left his horns at the hotel. So, he picked up whatever was closest, played a couple phrases, looked askance at the trumpet, set it down, and continued with the class. Everybody’s jaw dropped; the horn was the worst piece of shit I’ve ever played on — it leaked, sounded awful, and you couldn’t play it in tune to save your life. But Charlie still sounded like Charlie when he played it.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
At some point an average jack-o-lantern with elastics stretched over the hole will sound better than even the best strad. That is because at some point everything that is used will break.
...
there appear to be no characterizing differences between the perceived sound from well-made orthodox instruments on any age when played by a skilled player
That's because they used the wrong speaker cables and missed out on the warm sound only pure gold provides.
I contend that even though Stradivarius did not incorporate eukaryotic organisms into his process he still was a fun guy.
Also keep in mind consumers of classical music prefer the sound of a modern violin. the tension of the strings has increased meaningfully over the centuries and so has the pitch. So a Stradivarius isn't really built to handle the tension or modern strings.
This isn't exactly true. Nearly all 18th-century violins have been radically overhauled to meet 19th-century standards for sound projection. The neck was re-cut to bend back to allow for greater string tension, which also had to be absorbed by a heavier bass-bar under the left foot of the bridge.
But this aside, the majority of violin players still tend to use gut strings (usually wound with silver) by preference. Synthetic strings can work well on some instruments, but YMMV. On my own instruments, I have had some success with synthetics on the middle strings.
the AK-DL1 will bring out all the nuances in digital audio reproduction
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Especially because if you actually own a Denon device with Denon Link (I do) it tells you straight out that all you need is twisted pair cable. However my guess is that some audiophile types whined that they couldn't buy "audiophile grade" Cat-5 to Denon. Denon then decided they'd more than happily put a hose in their pockets and suck the money out.
It's honestly REALLY fun to read dozens of people trying to rationalize the appeal of Stradivarius violins as being some sort of grand, elitist, social experiment. They're fantastic instruments, they're old, they're relatively rare, and they have a lot of history and legends behind them. Music is the full emotional effect. You can make an instrument that sounds as a good as a Stradivarius, but there are plenty of people that are swept away by the romanticism and mysticism of the original.
Unleash the anecdotes!
Sure. There's no doubt that violins made along a similar pattern will sound approximately similar to an independent observer.
But to the player, the difference can be quite profound. I am a violinist, and love well-made istruments of any vintage, but there is nothing that says modern instrumnts are in any way inferior to classic Italian achines.
That's your blind test, right there.
Wasn't double-blind, though, which can make all the difference in a test of the tonality of a musical instrument. Much of an instrument's tone comes from the player, not the instrument. And a lot of what we perceive as "tone" isn't tone at all anyway - all a musician would need to do was play an instrument louder and a sizable number of people will think that makes it sound "better".
What's really needed is for a robot to play these instruments - that's the only way to ensure they'd all be played the exact same way every time.
The Independent newspaper carried out a lovely little experiment a couple of years ago. They took a very famous violinist (can't remember who now), gave her a Stradivarius, and sent her busking under a bridge by Waterloo station in London. At one point, the reporter who was accompanying her went to ask a homeless guy sitting under the bridge what he thought. "Is that a Stradivarius?", he asked straight out. Turned out the guy was from Stradivari's home town of Cremona and would've known the sound of a Strad anywhere.
Now, just think how unlikely it is that someone will roll up and busk with a Strad, and yet this guy was sure he knew what he was hearing. So yeah, they have a distinctive sound all right.
this is actually informative scientific news. don't see why it's in the Idle section.
A Strad is the best available. If you've got a Strad you can relax and stop worrying whether your neighbor's violin might be better.
No sig today...
And if you lick it, you have an awesome shroom trip.
What about a $5000 violin...?
No sig today...
That article says both:
A) Most people probably couldn't tell the different between a high-end modern instrument and a Strad.
B) That they didn't actually do any tests on any instruments, but they think (pure conjecture) that many people could tell the difference between a modern, mass-produced violin and a Strad.
Play the instrument louder? One of the supposed advantages of the Strad is is that it can be played loudly, which is rather important in a large concert hall. No amplification, remember?
Teaching a robot to play a violin would be an interesting exercise in AI. I'd imagine that there's a certain amount of feedback involved--"this technique sounds particularly good on this violin, I shall use more of it."
Didn't "they" do a double-blind study that showed acoustic experts couldn't actually tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a Wal-Mart?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
His name was Antonio Stradivari, Stradivarius was his latinized name.
Being myself from Cremona, home of Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri violin makers, I suppose they'll have a long way to go to get the sound of a '700 violin. I'm not saying they won't, sometimes, tough, technology has costs too high to reproduce artisans craftmanship.
By the way in Cremona every day one of the Stradivari's is played in the City Hall. They need to be played to conserve their sound quality; so if you pass near Milan, you can arrange for a hearing.
This may be a bit offtopic (having nothing to do with violins) but I would agree that well-made instruments of various ages sound very similar.
My particular anecdote being that I was given a chance to play an original gibson les paul, and a modern remake of the same les paul, and found them to both sound incredibly nice. There was a bit of a difference though, but I'm not sure I could really put my finger on it. I did play the same bits on both (and on the same amp, in the same test room). :D
The epiphone version, however, sounded like a cheap guitar
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQmoTJFScMY
I learned the violin a long time ago. I never got very good at it, but I got to talk to a lot of people that were a lot better than me. The general opinion was that above a fairly basic level, a good player could make a good noise out of most instruments. Indeed, there have been blindfold tests using violins made of aluminium or carbon fibre. However, most good players would agree that some instruments are a lot easier and more satisfying to play. This even extends to violin bows, which I find a bit more bizarre.
This makes the blindfold test rather harder to do. The violinist could probably still be blindfolded, and they would probably recognize their own instrument. They might be able to use other senses, such as touch. However, it seems a reasonable thing to try.
snobbery is hardly a surprise coming from NPR or violin players, either group has a certain tendency towards that behavior.
My fiddle instructor couldn't tell the difference between my 200 year old German fiddle and my 10 year old Chinese fiddle... It could be that his hands were over his ears the whole time, or the medication, not sure which.
I think that the analogy has been stretched to the limit.
Violins are finely crafted instruments. They are hand tuned, and require some expertise to build well. If there was some sort of formula for precision crafting great violins, mass production would be simple.
But even then, there would be measurable differences between a $100 violin and a $10,000 violin. It's not as if there's some foundry cranking out violin chips, and the difference between models lies in whether the "case" is woodgrained plastic or genuine maple, spruce and willow.
You can look at a multi thousand dollar DVD player, say "digital's digital", and eschew it for a $30 version-- if you don't mind the occasional jams and vibrations that come from using a plastic case.
But apply that same reasoning to a turntable, and you'll end up with a device that simply can't play records very well. Every wobble, every slew of the motor, every imbalanced gear will ultimately find its way into the sound and distort it.
Speaker cables? Bah. I'd rather use speaker cables than coat hangers-- flexibility is useful. But most of the arguments used to sell boutique speaker cable are false analogies to phonographs, where vibrations tend to matter.
Finally, the general public doesn't buy expensive violins Violinists do. If a violinist believes that the expensive violin's tone is sweeter to her highly trained ears, if the expensive violin is somehow more responsive to how she wants it to sound, then she'll find the money and pay the higher price. And if fungi treated wood makes a good violin sound extraordinary to a violinists ears, I'm all for it.
Maybe. This article says "ten thousand euros." Perhaps worth it to a professional. A student can learn on a less expensive instrument, but at some point, that student's talent might "outgrow" the violin.
There's competition from China, but many of those cheap violins are tarted up to "look like" a more expensive instrument. Unless they also "sound like" the real thing, it's pointless.
At one point, the reporter who was accompanying her went to ask a homeless guy sitting under the bridge what he thought. "Is that a Stradivarius?", he asked straight out. Turned out the guy was from Stradivari's home town of Cremona and would've known the sound of a Strad anywhere.
Joke the First: What the article doesn't mention is that when he asked that he was pointing at a pigeon.
Joke the Second: That was "Stradivarius Joe", and he always asks that.
The enemies of Democracy are
Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic.
source
Even though I really like my (older) Denon receiver, I will never buy another one because of that "audiophile grade" Denon Link cable. If they'll rip someone off for 6' of cat 5 (with directionality arrow!!) I have to believe that they're ripping me off at least a little bit on anything I buy. I was really quite bummed when I saw it: I had always assumed that when I bought a better receiver I'd just get another Denon and not have to worry about it.
A better analogy: is a ferrari F430 better than a Civic? No need to answer that. If you don't understand the difference between a complex machine and a piece of conductor metal then you are an idiot.
Well I bought a 3808CI about a month ago and I love it. Good value for the money IMO. It is extremely capable, uses good parts, has good features, sounds good, etc.
I'd be mad if they said you HAD to use their cable, but they specifically say you just use twisted pair. Also Denon Link is more or less useless these days. They introduced it back when there was no way to do digital DVD-A/SACD to the receiver. HDMI wasn't done yet. Now that you can stream it over HDMI, nobody cares so much.
There ARE such a thing as better HDMI cables. However they don't improve picture quality. What they do is improve the range at which you can get a picture at a given resolution. The higher rez your display (also higher frame rate) the more bandwidth it takes and the higher a signaling rate you need on HDMI. The cables have to be made with tighter tolerances to be able to do that over longer distances. So, a cheap cable might do 1080p to 25 feet, and 720p to 50 feet, a better one might do 1080p to 150 feet.
However, good HDMI cables aren't really what you get form Monster, and aren't worth the price you pay. Bluejeans sells some good Belden HDMI cables that are extremely well built and thus good for really long, high bandwidth runs. Monoprice also has some pretty good ones for a much lower price, that still get good distance.
So there IS such a thing as quality HDMI cable, you just don't need it if you are going 6 feet from your receiver to your TV. It's more of a custom installation thing. If you have a receiver in the front of a room that feeds a projector in the back, and the cable runs up through the ceiling, maybe you have a 50+ foot run and cheap cable can't handle the high resolutions.
As a violinist with a ~$5000 instrument, I can confidently say there is a world of difference even between a $5000 instrument and a $10,000 instrument. However, it's important to note that tonal quality is only one, and not necessarily the most weighted, factor in pricing a violin. Others are age, the fame of the maker, the construction of the instrument, and the condition, all of which possibly imply good tonal quality, but don't necessarily ensure it.
In other words, there are huge divergences in quality in violins, and good violins tend to cost a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars). However, inside particular price ranges (say, $20,000-30,000) the more expensive instrument may not necessarily be the better.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Fuel Economy, naturally.
... slowly growing in cool summers and cold winters... why don't modern builders get their wood from Finland or something...? jeez
What does "ripping you off" mean, though? What percentage of profit is excessive? Like with everything else, the important metric is what it's worth to you, personally. If you're comparing similar devices from two manufacturers, and reviews say that the slightly more expensive one is also slightly better, it's up to you to decide what you want to pay for. It doesn't really matter whether the better device's manufacturer also came up with a way to manufacture it really cheaply and is making a huge profit. Everyone will charge whatever the device is worth on the market.
The audiophile grade cable is obvious horseshit, so just don't buy it and you'll be fine.
My Sig: SEGV
I'm happy that people are still researching violin making. And there are many new techniques in the last 20 or so years. But I keep hearing that while the Strads are good, a $20,000 modern violin is better. At least this seems to be a consensus view among professionals. The key problem with violin making is consistency. So people have attempted to make graphite violins, and so on. And if all violins could be top notch, they wouldn't cost $20,000.
I, personally, own a very poor violin. A modern $500 violin would be an improvement. My son's $200 3/4 size (it's really just an inch shorter than mine) sounds, in my opinion, better. And for MY violin, pretty much the only opinion that matters is mine. I'm my only audience.
There are people who have publicly said that if they obtained a Stradivarius, it would quickly meet with an accident, for insurance reasons. Not for personal gain. Such money could fund other music endeavours. I'd have thought he could have just sold it. A Stradivarius is an historical artifact, without regard to how good it sounds, and for that reason alone is worth the million+ dollars they often fetch.
-- Stephen.
You sent me off to Vault 92, but oh no, it wasn't that easy. I had to travel TO THE MIDDLE OF D.C. first. I had to break into a god damned super mutant fortress. Those bastards nearly shot my arm off! And don't forget about the droids! The Mr. Gutsies, the sentry bots, the robobrains, and the protectetrons. At least the robobrains had a cute voice. The lasers though, those weren't cute at all. Not at all. And then I got to the records, found the location of the vault, and had to bust my post-apocalyptic behind across the wretched wastes. And when I got there, was it all fun and games? Did I arrive to find some kind of chorus of angels, whose musical talent had been preserved in an underground fortress? Surprise! I fought bloatflies, mirelurks, and even a damn king. I got clawed at, magic mirelurk king circled at, and spat at, and it was very acidic spit, I'll have you know. Burned right through the vault wall. You wretched, old hag; I did all of that for one lousy violin that could be reproduced with some fungus? God damn you, woman. God damn you.
no, there is a real different between a strat any every other violin. 500 dollar violin and 150 dollar violin? the only difference is quality of the assembly.
Yes, I hate 'magical' thinking the surrond the 'audiophile culture' especially when people push 100 HDMI 1.3 b cables when you can go to Amazon and get them for a nickle plus 2.95 shipping and handling.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I do not have a musical ear, and my attempts to learn to play an instrument just dropped short of the instrument bursting into flames from the embarrassment.
I have heard one, and it seems a lot different. Considering the wood has a real measurable effect on the sound, I am tempted to think there is a noticeable difference.
Yes, maybe I was biased. I can say that until I heard one I didn't expect to be a difference. I wouldn't of gone, but the woman who invited me was hot.
Yes I know the value of an anecdote.
it's not like there trying to sell copper ina pretty package as being better then copper in an ugly package.
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That book doesn't really address several issue, and cite no tests. It talks factually when talking about human hearing, but anecdotal when talking about Strad.
Not to say there is a difference, but that book isn't a good go to reference.
Actually there is no argument, there is a difference, the discussion is it it enough to matter? Different woods effect sound differently. AS do different manufacturing techniques. Responsivness is another issue.
Blinded tests can be done.
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You don't see the problem there?
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My Strad goes to 11.
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No robot needed. In fact, it would even be a good idea.
You have two violens The control and the strad.
you get 20 players.
label the Violens A and 1
The only person who knows which is which is the labeler. the label placing done in seclusion.
The labeler send the violence into the testing area via a third party.
You place the violence down.
A coin tosser tosses the coin. If it's heads the play A, if tails they play B
You have independent people select which one they think sounds better.
Do a second test with just high precision sound monitoring and recordings. So you can see if the frequencies are different.
You also ahve the players answer a survey about how the instrument played and sounded. This is data you can't get from the robot.
With enough people and random choosing elements you can get normalized unbiased data.
Also, The players are never in view of the audience.
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... sorry