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Comment by leelin | Hacker News Reader

Wait, isn't $2500 very cheap for a violin? I seem to remember the rather mediocre violin I had as a kid costing more than that (such hopeful tiger parents).

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You CAN get a great sounding violin on eBay for $200, but you might have to buy and return a couple dozen violins to end up with one you like. My story is, that for my kid, I bought a $5,000 violin from a dealer after doing blind testing among a range of violins with ourselves and my kid's high-powered teachers. Everybody agreed that this was a great sounding violin. A couple years later, I wanted a cheap violin for myself so I bought a $200 violin on eBay. It arrived with a fallen soundpost so I needed to take it to the violin store for them to reset it for $15, plus, I put new strings on it for $40. I ended up selling that one and buying another $200 violin, which needed a new bridge, which costs about $75 at the local violin shop. I didn't want to spend so much money for each of the violins I was trying, so instead of getting it fixed at the shop, I ended up learning how to shape a new bridge myself, to save money. What followed was a couple year period where I bought and sold about two dozen $200 violins. I would buy them on eBay, fix them up into playable condition, and resell them from my home via Craigslist.

So, the buyers would come with their own current violins and I would put my eBay specials AND my kid's $5,000 into the mix for the blind sound tests. The $5,000 violin was always one of the leaders but not always the winner.

Eventually I settled on a single violin that I liked the best to keep for my own. I took it to the violin shop where people had much more skill than me and spent about $600 to get a nicer bridge, soundpost, and for some repair work that I didn't have the skills to tackle. So, yes, I got a great sounding violin for $200, a couple years of trial and error learning, and then another $600 for rehab.

This is pretty much why I can't believe that any serious musician would buy a musical instrument for over a few hundred dollars, sight unseen. There are simply too many variables to make that kind of purchase worthwhile. If the buyer isn't serious about it, a cheaper instrument will probably be exactly what they need for years. For serious musicians, an instrument that they're comfortable with is more important than anything else, and they should be trying out every one before they buy it.

There are some rarer instruments where you almost have to, for instance a bass sax. You aren't going to find one for under several thousand even in bad condition, and if you buy new it's hard to find somewhere to try one model, let alone compare more than one of the half dozen new models.

Re-reading what I wrote, I guess I made it sound like a negative experience, but actually it was a fun adventure. All the buying experiences on eBay were positive. I never felt like I got ripped off. It was fun learning how to fiddle with fiddles. In theory, it could have even been a sort of money-making hobby, although I only managed to only about break even (Am I supposed to count my tool purchases against profit? Nah.)

Whoops, forgot the quote. I was responding specifically to the line:

>So, the buyers would come with their own current violins and I would put my eBay specials AND my kid's $5,000 into the mix for the blind sound tests. The $5,000 violin was always one of the leaders but not always the winner.

My poor Violin cost less than USD $100, you really ought to have got a very nice violin for USD $2500! If you still have it, it might be worth examining it and looking for a better resale value all these years later.

> If you still have it, it might be worth examining it and looking for a better resale value all these years later.

Just maybe don't sell it on eBay.

Cheap for an antique, perhaps. An everyday playing violin, especially for a student, can be had for one or two hundred dollars. Less, on eBay.

I've bought a couple dozen $200 violins on eBay. If you are looking for a cheap student violin, and you don't have much experience yourself with violins, I would not recommend buying on eBay. It's too hit or miss.

For that student, spend a little more. The cost of the lessons soon makes a extra couple hundred bucks for the violin insignificant.

For a really good violin, quite likely. My daughter has a cello that she obtained in High School years ago, and it was easily three time that, and it was not considered to be anything extraordinary.

You can spend $2500 on a bow.

Really? I think my childhood violin cost less than $200.

Well, that doesn't really mean much, if we don't know how old you are and can't adjust for inflation. :P

I have a friend who teaches violin to kids. He says that really cheap violins won't stay in tune at all, which makes teaching very difficult; it's impossible to tell the difference between poor playing and poor performance from the instrument. $200 (today) is most likely still in that category, with cheap but usable starting somewhere over $500.

This. The violin, bow, and strings all affect the sound produced.

In high school, I bought my violin and bow used for around $750. While it was fine for orchestral/symphonic stuff, it definitely paled in tone, volume, and responsiveness compared to some of my friends' more expensive violins.

When I got to be the soloist during my senior year, I borrowed a much nicer violin from my director and bought a new bow because I simply couldn't get the right sound out of my own violin.

Sorry, about staying in tune, I don't physics, mechanics, can support that teacher's belief. Do the pegs slip? That's adjustable. Are the strings crappy? Replace them. My experience is that there is a lot of false belief and superstition about violins including among violin teachers.

I suspect it's more likely that the wood warps in response to some combination of temperature, humidity and the mechanical forces applied to it during playing. It wouldn't take very much warping to cause a change in the sound.

Two thoughts:

1) The operative pieces of wood here are the nut, the bridge, and the fingerboard. These pieces are all non-integral, relatively easily, cheaply replaceable parts of the violin. I can see how a nut or bridge that's too high would make the violin harder to play with good intonation, and for sure, a fingerboard that is worn or misshapen could, but other than that, I don't think there's any other part piece of wood that matters.

2) Not a rule, but sort of a default rule of thumb for a certain level of violin playing is don't play on open strings because you can't do vibrato and you can't adjust the pitch while you're playing. I remember my kid's intense, Teutonic teacher saying to him, "Well, your strings are out of tune, but that's NO EXCUSE for playing out of tune!", meaning, she expected my kid to have been able to make the adjustments on the fly with his finger placements.

The violin in the article supposedly made it through WWII.

Lots of things made it through WWII. Bringing that up (it survived the Arab oil embargo, Iran-Contra, WWI, the Spanish-American Influenza, 9/11...) is just rhetoric to drive home that it was more than a century old.

Saying that a violin has survived the oil embargo would not make any sense. Saying that this brittle musical instrument has survived a brutal war does make sense. Especially in contrast with its (allegedly) not having survived a legal dispute.

'Erica' is selling a "French violin". WW II had a couple of unfortunate local consequences for France. Most of the list of things you mentioned might be perfectly irrational to name in a letter. WW I or II are good examples for 'Wow, it survived' remarks on local pieces of craftsmanship or art.

WWII treated France pretty well on the brute destruction scale. France didn't even lose most of its sovereignty after the invasion, with the Vichy regime resisting German demands when it wished to.

They didn't go through anything like what Japan, Germany, or Russia did, with the cities razed by fighting (Stalingrad), fire-bombing (Tokyo or Dresden), or atomic bombs (Hiroshima & Nagasaki). If a French violin had survived the siege of Stalingrad - now that would be impressive. But just being in France? That's about as impressive as a random Englishman surviving the Battle of Britain.

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