Million-dollar Strads fall to modern violins in blind ‘sound check’

[SEAWOLF97]

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The secret of Stradivariuses may be that there is no secret beyond the great musicians who play them.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...nd-sound-check

[Lee in Montreal]

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The secret of Stradivariuses may be that there is no secret beyond the great musicians who play them.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...nd-sound-check

Reminds me of a test in Road'n'Track between a good old Porsche 356 and a Honda family minivan on an autocross. Yesteryear's champion lost. ;-)

[Tony Sullivan]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2...-old-italians/

http://www.thestrad.com/research-sug...ivarius-sound/

https://eic.rsc.org/feature/investig...020139.article

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n..._violin_2.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/s...wood.html?_r=0

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sc...st-858329.html

http://content.time.com/time/health/...878425,00.html

[Tony Sullivan]

“What we might find from Frohlich’s work is that there’s a way to describe a perfect air volume before you hear it, before we finish the violin,” says John Montgomery, a violin maker who repairs instruments at Smithsonian museums and the Library of Congress. Such knowledge, he adds, “can be repeated from one instrument to the next.”


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-c...rius-13807009/

[edgewound]

Live music listening is one thing. How it is captured in a recording could be significantly different from a purely harmonic standpoint.

Simply because the instrument is "louder" does not necessarily make it "better". There are WAY too many variables.

It's a pretty subjective exercise...BUT...it's good to know that a fiddler can get by with less than a 7 figure instrument. Much like my "partsocaster" can keep up with any local hack playing a vintage Les Paul.

Tone starts with the hands on the instrument. Players' tones vary as much as fingerprints. Each is unique.

[hsosdrum]

...It's a pretty subjective exercise...

Everything about creating and experiencing art is a purely subjective exercise.

My drumkit consists of certain kinds of drums, cymbals and drumheads that are tuned a certain way because when I play them they provide a direct connection to my inner voice; when I play a different drumkit that connection is almost never as strong as it is when I play my own instrument.

I always change the channel when the radio plays Mahler or Springsteen, but I turn up the volume when it plays Stravinsky or The Beatles; someone else may do the opposite. There is no right or wrong — that's the difference between art and science.

[Ed Kreamer]

Colleagues,

Years ago when I was a student, I had the pleasure the hearing the then concert master of the Seattle Symphony giving a master class for string players and he brought 2 fiddles with him. one was a Strad and the other was as Guarneri.
It was obvious that the guarneri was his preferred instrument. The tonal differences between the two were very subtle. At least to me they were but then I'm a lowly brass player so what do I know.
There was ( or maybe is ) a cello maker in Texas I think, who says that he can build a cello made of aluminum that can rival the classic instruments of old in tonal quality. Given where I sit in the orchestra, I can't hear the many subtlety's of the string players instruments. They would lost anyway with the chorus effect of the string sections.

My point is this: this debate will continue into perpetuity, much as those espouse speaker "cables" thicker the the lines holding an aircraft carrier to a pier vs. good old 14' zip cord. Maybe that is not a good analogy. String players such a those mentioned by Tony spend years honing their skills, and hearing things that most of us can't hear. If they like a certain fiddle and can tell us why who are we to doubt them.

Question for Tony Sullivan: are you a string player?

And now it's time to practice.

Ed