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Comment by matjet | Hacker News Reader

To add a datapoint:

In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8q3zrCYMRw, they managed to differentiate most high end violins (4/5 tests - 10 Violins).

Incidentally, the only mistake was with one of the two Stradivari examples.

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I worry that the takeaway for people that only read clickbait headlines about the 2012 Stradivarius study was: expert violinists can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive violins.

All the new violins in that study were high-end instruments by trained artisans, which can easily be $100,000 or more. So really the takeaway is: modern players like violins from today's masters of violinmaking as much as or more than those by Stradivarius.

AFAIK there were also cheaper ones, but the more important takeaway, IMO, is that Stradivarius isn't something magical (like this article also claims in the headline), but simply a very well crafted violin. Which is great, but no lost art.

They are master quality violins for the time period and they pretty much set the standard for modern violins.

If they were being made today they would be considered very good quality violins and fetch in the $10,000+ range or more most likely, especially considering the location they are made in, the materials, and the methods employed to build them.

"They are master quality violins for the time period and they pretty much set the standard for modern violins."

Classic literature is the same way. It's classic because of its influence, not just quality.

I dunno - the blind test results sort of prove that they are the gold plated monster cables of violins :p

That test compares them to modern violins. Maybe comparing them with their contemporaries would provide more accurate results? I know I prefer the sound of a Guarneri violin, but Strads are reputed to have better piercing power for carrying to the back of a concert hall, which was definitely an advantage in the days before electric amplification and computationally modeled and strategically baffled reverberant chambers for maximum audio enjoyment over the widest possible range of listeners.

Looks like it was only 3 Strads and 3 new violins, which were selected from a pool of 15 submitted by violinmakers. So only really good violins. (But also a very small sample.)

8 players chose a Strad as their favorite, so it's not as clear-cut as "new violins are better." It's more like, Strads are in a similar league, but do not outclass, new violins, despite costing an order of magnitude+ more. But then again, they are pieces of rare collectible art that are hundreds of year old–it's kind of amazing that you can play them at all!

So it's more like: imagine if there were a handful of surviving vintage audio cables from the 1600s (okay, the 1800s?) that performed almost as well as modern ones. I imagine they'd cost more money. And that wouldn't be so crazy, given their history.

Here's the original study & NYT coverage for reference:

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1619443114

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/in-play-off-betwe...

>I worry that the takeaway for people that only read clickbait headlines about the 2012 Stradivarius study was: expert violinists can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive violins.

A key point that's omitted in most of the reporting is that the Strads were loaned to the organisers on the condition that they not alter their setup in any way, whereas all the modern violins were adjusted and given new strings immediately before the test. It's also not true that the testers couldn't tell the difference between the new and old violins; they weren't asked whether they could tell, they were only asked which they preferred.

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