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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

Is the mystique around Stradivarius instruments subjectively put on a pedestal like wine tasting or audiophiles or can someone actually tell the difference in a blind test?

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Stradivarius instruments deserve being put on a pedestal for historical reasons. Stradivari basically defined the sound of the modern violin, using flatter arching and f holes with smaller hole areas than the Amatis, which resulted in a significantly more powerful instrument that was better suited to playing in a concert hall (vs. the chamber music of earlier times). Stradivarius violins are also noted for their extremely fine craftsmanship and attention to detail. The majority of modern violins are still modeled after Stradivarius examples (with a probably smaller number modeled after del Gesu instruments and some other makers). Most top soloists play on (heavily modified) Strads, and so it seems pretty clear that, at the very least, Strads are not holding any soloists back - and that is not the case for Amati instruments, for example, which despite being coveted for their age and history just don't have the same power and sound projection as Strads.

But, as other comments have said, there have been at this point a good slew of blind tests, and Strads are hardly ever recognized better than chance when compared to modern instruments, even when played by experts and judged by experts. People have been studying and modeling after Strads for so long it would be pretty shocking if we couldn't make instruments that sounded as good. In my mind that doesn't make Strads any less valuable - an original Picasso is still valued so highly because it was created by the master that invented Cubism, but that doesn't mean that a modern painter couldn't create a Cubist painting that was "just as good", objectively.

> But, as other comments have said, there have been at this point a good slew of blind tests, and Strads are hardly ever recognized better than chance when compared to modern instruments, even when played by experts and judged by experts.

Others are also commenting about audiophiles. But there's a big difference: an audiophile's sentiment about their gold wires doesn't change the sound coming out of the speakers for the rest of the listening audience. On the other hand, a violinist's sentiment typically does.

Also, just to be clear-- are you saying there are blind tests where an expert tried playing multiple violins and couldn't guess better than chance which one was the Strad?

Edit: clarification

> Also, just to be clear-- are you saying there are blind tests where an expert tried playing multiple violins and couldn't guess better than chance which one was the Strad?

Yes, this has been done many times.

Yeah I completely understand the value of the Stradivarius as a work of art. My question was more functional and it seems like the vast majority of the value comes from it being art and not from being functionally better than something we can make today.

There is another factor in bieng chosen as the current player of any instrument such as a Stradivarius, the moment they are handed there charge and told,there is the door, go, must produce a level of focus not encountered in most peoples lives.

A bit of engineering and a lot of myth and degradation due to time.

The engineering seems to be a combination of genuine construction advances and the usage of wood that was abnormally dense due to having been grown during a big drought.

This, of course, contributed to the "myths" around the Strads with the varnishes, techniques, etc. supposedly being "The Thing(tm)" that made Strads so much better.

Finally, wood degrades with time--period. It doesn't matter how much you try to preserve it, it's just fact. The current Strads are either "Ship of Theseus" type violins, or they are heavily degraded.

At this point, modern luthiers create better instruments than even a Strad in its prime. They have access to better woods, better glues and finishes, better tools and training, better analyzers and better players than anyone in the time of Stradivarius.

When played as close to double blind as is possible, the data comes back with modern players preferring modern violins made by modern luthiers over the old Strads.

I'm a semi-professional violinist who got to borrow a Strad for a couple months and whose long-term teacher has the lifetime loan of a del Gesu (and has had access to a Strad but prefers the del Gesu!)

I don't have Studies to back this up, but anecdotally:

* Playing fine violins takes a lot of practice with the specific instrument to begin to unlock its potential. I was scratching the surface after a couple months; people with longer-term loans say it takes years.

* Strads in particular are surprisingly hard to make sound good at first. I'd say there was a good two weeks where I sounded better on my $2500 Chinese-made violin than I did on the multi-million dollar Strad. (del Gesus sound great out of the box. This is widely agreed upon but I don't know why it is)

* In terms of pure craftsmanship there are many contemporary makers who are working as well as Strad and del Gesu, and I don't place much stock in them having access to uniquely good wood or magic varnish or anything like that.

* However, for poorly-understood reasons the act of playing a violin "opens up" the sound and also gives you access to more and more tone colors. A 300-year-old violin that's been played a lot will therefore have a much bigger tonal palette than a contemporary violin, even if any individual tone color isn't strictly better than the tone of a contemporary violin.

* The corollary is that in the year 2300 I believe top-end contemporary instruments will be as good as Strads are now.

* If you just thought "what if we simulate the vibrations of playing on new instruments to expedite their aging", you're not the first! Some luthiers hook new instruments up to a specialized amplifier and effectively play music through the violin for a couple weeks before selling it. A lot of people claim this helps a lot, but I don't have first-hand experience of it.

Humans are all subject to cognitive biases. Musicians are no different. That is why controlled testing is the only way to determine if these extraordinary instruments actually produce extradordinary sound.

Wouldn't you like to know if you could sound just as good on an ordinary instrument? I imagine a lot of money could be saved and and a lot of stress could be avoided.

If I had access to a del Gesù why would I care how I sound on an ordinary instrument? Have you ever handled a tool of your craft that was used by many masters before you? The cognitive biases of musicians are part of the music they make. It is the role of other people to examine the instruments, and no one is stopping them. Musicians must keep their biases.

Anyway everyone who uses one of these still has their "normal" (masterfully crafted modern) instruments for when it's the more practical choice.

People are making instruments in Tasmania from deep flooded lake bottom revovered Huon pine and other ancient wood. I'd be fascinated if this old wood, Virgin trees from hundreds of years ago, had the same kind of tonal range.

I had my cello played in on a machine when I bought it as it was included no charge. I didn't A/B it though so I don't know how much of a difference it made.

I think modern day instruments are competitive and only getting better (I bought a modern cello by an excellent maker and couldn't be happier).

One large difference today is instrument makers are starting to share their techniques with each other, whereas Stradivarius took that information to the grave.

With Strad you're getting a high end instrument but also paying through the nose for rarity and legend.

Only a handful of controlled tests have been conducted and listeners failed to identify or prefer the Strads. None of the experiments were very big so there might be a perceptible difference that can be detected with more statistical power. Blinding the eyes and noses of top level musicians might bias the results.

It is very difficult to obtain access to the instruments. The general sentiment from musicians and collectors seems to be that they don't want a bunch of scientists to come into their world and tell them that what they are or are not hearing or they just don't understand why controlled tests are required.

The general sentiment from musicians and collectors seems to be that they don't want a bunch of scientists to come into their world and tell them that what they are or are not hearing or they just don't understand why controlled tests are required.

There seems to be the same sentiment from audiophiles against testing their ridiculously overpriced placebos, although sometimes it does happen and the results are exactly as you'd expect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015987

Furthermore, there are many intangible qualities of the way an instrument resonates and feels while playing that often contributes more to the better playing than the raw sound itself. It’s strange to say but instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound

Sounds to me like a bunch of physical and therefore measurable (and tangible) properties and some placebo effect on top.

I understand what you're getting at, and I can appreciate it, but it's also kind of bullshit. You say "instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound" - well, if that's the case, then people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests, which so far they basically haven't.

A relationship with an instrument takes time. There are more factors than the mechanical use of an instrument, our hands and bodies feel things on subconscious levels, leading to emergent qualities that don’t fit neatly into “sounds better or worse”. For musicians and artists this is a no brainer, for those that haven’t experienced this I understand why you are incredulous but it doesn’t mean it is a throwaway factor.

But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.

I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I certainly appreciate all the emotions and culture that go into making beautiful music on a cello. But it's important to separate that placebo affect ("I think it sounds better because I know it's a Strad"), from the real physical differences, because people have gone to great lengths to find "the secret of Strad": was it his varnish, the Maunder Minimum, an extended drought, special wood treatment to prevent woodworm, etc. etc. Except time and time again we find there is no "Strad secret", beyond his expert craftsmanship, attention to detail, and fundamental changes he made to the shape of the plates of his instruments compared to his predecessors.

>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?

edit: by the way

>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.

I guess another way of putting it would be that the aura of an instrument that elicits a more sentimental playing of it by the musician is sort of not really interesting or relevant because you can just lie about any instrument to elicit it.

No, I am not talking about aura at all, I'm just saying that the physical, measurable sound that an instrument produces in response to being played, physically and measurably, could have more subtle effects on artistic performance (as a consequence of the physical vibrations of the object and the way those vibrations respond to the player and vice versa) than those that could be elided in an afternoon of A/B-testing under the banner of "stradivarius myth DEBUNKED".

In controlled tests the instruments are played by highly skilled musicians (usually the ones that possess them) but they don't know which instrument they are playing. Musicians cannot perfectly reproduce their performance so statistical methods are used to separate the effect from the noise, just like every other scientific experiment.

Are the studies blind or double blind? If the musicians do not know what they are playing, they will not be able to “respond” to it.

There have been both. Here is a famous example from around 1977 I believe that was broadcast on the BBC (I knew of this example but this is the first time I actually found a recording of the broadcast): https://www.baroquemusic.org/violincomparison.html . The violinist playing is Manoug Parikian, who presumably knew which instrument was which, and neither Isaac Stern nor Pinchas Zukerman (both world class soloists) nor Charles Beare (a famous luthier described as "the most esteemed authenticator in the world" by the NYTimes) could identify which violin was which.

You’re going to run into a bunch of trouble using “soul” for anything. It serves a purpose but that’s usually either laziness, inability to measure some physical quality or a placebo effect. Generally pointing that out will end up putting someone in the pedant bucket but I’m risking it.

It is none of those things despite being not easy to measure. There are many phenomena not empirically proven that science still mentions and theorizes about. The quantum theory of cognition points to something like a soul mattering more than it used to for example. There are countless scientific discussions involving unknown unknowns of our universe yet as soon as we go the opposite direction, into the unknown unknowns of our own experience, that is somehow unscientific?

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