Oh, but the stradivarius sounds so very -

[R.G.]

- ordinary? Middling good? Last among equals?
Turns out that double blind tests rip holes in the magic violin myth as well. This was done in 2012, but I only found it today.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/violinists-cant-tell-the-difference-between-stradivarius-violins-and-new-ones

Goes with the idea that magic is indeed real - but its extent is limited to inside your mind.

[jubal81]

Another way to look at it is someone was making instruments in the 17th century that can compete with modern products -- and well enough to last hundreds of years. Pretty good feat of engineering.

[Ben N]

There's a guitar maker here in Israel, Tal Macmull, who goes to extraordinary lengths to find sources of aged wood (as much as 100 years) for his guitars, which are basically very high quality, very expensive, Fender-alikes. He has even bought old houses in order to strip wood from them. Having played a couple of his guitars, I can tell you that they are extraordinary instruments, and that judgment is confirmed by some of the top name folks who have bought and play them. But I can't tell you that this is because of the aged woods, and I doubt anyone can.

[Mark Hammer]

1) I don't think there is any denying that those old Cremona builders set the benchmark for what a good violin should sound like, and how it should respond.  But that doesn't mean that, with the benefit of several hundred years' hindsight, people have not been able to learn from, and achieve, the build quality that such benchmarks represent.  I grew up in Montreal, and bagel affionados know that Montreal bagels represent the apex of bagel arts; most everything else is a bun with a hole in it.  But over the years, people learned and applied the Montreal methodology and came to meet the same standards.  The last time we were in Halifax, our son took us to a local bagel place, and I was so impressed with the authenticity, I felt compelled to give my compliments to the baker "as a native Montrealer".  He then told me that he had actually worked at one of the two "bagel-Meccas" in Montreal for 18 years before striking out on his own.  So, just because something involves arcane knowledge doesn't mean that no one else can acquire that knowledge.

2) For professional string players, the bow can often be as personal and important a device as the instrument itself.  The article did not say whether the test-musicians used their own preferred bow, or were supplied the same standardized one, so as to rule out contaminants.  If one used a bow that was not your personal choice, there is a very real possibility that it smushed together any potential differences i the responsiveness of the various violins.

3) The good part of the article, and study, linked to is that it involved players rather than merely listeners.  Not that good and knowledgeable listeners would be unable to tell the difference between "good" and characterless violins.  Rather, as a fundamentally mechanical device, the player has a better sense of whether the instrument allows them to reach the sonic objective they were aiming for at various points, which I think is a somewhat more stringent test than merely listening.  I'm sure any of us here would give the thumbs down to any high-priced guitar or bass if the neck or instrument balance didn't complement our preferred playing style, or allow us to hit the notes we wanted with the attack we wanted.

4) For many years, academic achievement in "Catholic" schools tended to be higher than achievement in public schools.  One might be tempted to think that there was something about the curriculum or teaching style of such schools, or maybe even, gasp, the religious affiliation, that produced such differences.  Ultimately, though, people "end up" in local public schools, whereas parents of kids in Catholic schools had to select the school their children went to.  The act of deliberately choosing a school, rather than defaulting to what was available and nearby, is a sort of marker for what may be an average difference in parental attitude towards education.  Certainly not a difference between being Catholic or not, because around here one is just as likely to see hijabs in such schools as crucifix necklaces. 
A builder who selects wood is immediately going to be different than one who simply works with what is provided in the warehouse.  We may think that there is something special about the wood they use, but really the critical difference may be that they simply paid attention to, and picked the wood, and that this is a marker for a whole bunch of other build-quality aspects that accompany it.
People have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea of "markers", and often confuse them with causes.  My wife works in food safety, and this past week has been immersed in research literature on soft drinks.  She was showing me a large-scale study yesterday on mortality (from all causes) over a 15-year span, as a function of carbonated beverage intake.  There was a clear increase in mortality rates for those who consumed more soft drinks (e.g., daily, rather than monthly or weekly).  But people who consumed more soft drinks of any type also showed many indices of poor diet in a great many areas.  I.E., fizzy drinks were not the only "dietary sin" in their lives.  The more they drank pop, the more other dietary sins they tended to commit.  So, soft drinks were really more a marker than a cause.  That doesn't mean one should pay no attention to soft drink consumption, but one shouldn't think that cutting back on your favorite cola alone will magically produce the desired health result.  I can make a crappy guitar with the very best wood too.

[R.G.]

Well said Mark. There is a placebo effect of actually playing better because you believe the instrument/effects/amp is magically better, but as you note, it's much more interesting that this was done with players doing the choosing, which folds in the player's feel for the instrument as well.

Yeah, it's good that the guys 400-500 years ago did things that we still think are great. Humans in general probably haven't improved over that time span, so the distribution of raw talent/genius from the 1600s is probably about the same as today, and we all start with only talents and zero skill, knowledge and experience at birth. And we have learned a lot about how to drill down into the materials and the very structure of matter to find how things happen. I think it's great that we can produce violins (and by implication, many other things) that work arguably as well as the magic vintage stuff.

The double blind test has been an incredibly enlightening tool for finding where musical "magic" lives.

[ElectricDruid]

Yeah, it's good that the guys 400-500 years ago did things that we still think are great.

Well, that puts Leo Fender's guitars from the 1950's in their place, doesn't it?!?

I always thought it was a bit remarkable that many guitarists reckoned that nothing better had been done in the last seventy years, but then I don't know any violinists. They've clearly got a whole other level going on!

[willienillie]

Yep, that Ibanez RoadStar and Gorilla GG-25 down at the pawn shop are every bit as good as Jimmy Page's 1959 Les Paul and plexi Marshall.  To suggest otherwise would indicate a belief in "magic" "mojo" and "fairy dust."  No professional player could hear a difference in a blind test.

[Rob Strand]

I'm all for squashing the old myths I skimmed over the paper and the way they did the experiments looks pretty good.

One thing they do say is "21 experienced violinists to compare violins by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu with high-quality new instruments".   The main point is they are *new* and *high-end* instruments. The conclusion is about old wood vs new.  You shouldn't extend the conclusion beyond that  ie. that you can't tell the difference between classic instruments and junk.   
(Yep, sure some modern cheap stuff now is a zillion times better than cheap stuff from the 70's.)

You can see the same type of conclusion with modern basses which aim towards the vintage sound.  They do that in spite of old woods not being available.   Others have an intentionally more modern sound so they sound different by design.

[R.G.]

Yep, that Ibanez RoadStar and Gorilla GG-25 down at the pawn shop are every bit as good as Jimmy Page's 1959 Les Paul and plexi Marshall.  To suggest otherwise would indicate a belief in "magic" "mojo" and "fairy dust."  No professional player could hear a difference in a blind test.

I'm thinking you either didn't read the article or didn't like the concept.
As far as I know, no one has ever done a double blind test between Pages guitar and amp and the pawn shop alternatives. As Rob notes, the new instruments were high end modern ones. I didn't catch the article saying that they picked up any pawn shop prizes to put into the double blind mix. I feel pretty sure that there may be some modern guitars that would not compare. Just like I suspect that there may be newly made LPs that would make picky players have a hard time differentiating.

This ain't about political correctness either for or against vintage stuff. It's about finding out something real and trying to sidestep the maddening tendency for people to hear and see what they think they ought to.

[DIY Bass]

Yeah, it's good that the guys 400-500 years ago did things that we still think are great.

Well, that puts Leo Fender's guitars from the 1950's in their place, doesn't it?!?

I always thought it was a bit remarkable that many guitarists reckoned that nothing better had been done in the last seventy years, but then I don't know any violinists. They've clearly got a whole other level going on!

My theory on vintage guitars is that every batch of mass produced instruments has a whole pile of mediocre instruments, some truly amazing standouts and some real dogs.  Particularly from the old days when a lot more of the production was done manually.  The ones that were not so good are more likely to have been trashed over the years, and the ones that are left are the really good ones.  Not because the older ones were better, but because the better ones have survived.

[Rob Strand]

My theory on vintage guitars is that every batch of mass produced instruments has a whole pile of mediocre instruments, some truly amazing standouts and some real dogs. 

You see that a lot in 70s classical guitars.   The guitars were just made from whatever supplied woods.  Some guitars just happened to get tops from "flawless" wood and just happen to be the correct thickness to match the properties of the wood.    Compare that to modern day high-end master-built instruments where the maker selects the wood, tests the wood samples, in some cases they will join pieces of flawless wood (apparently joining good pieces is better than keeping flaws), then finally fine tuning the thickness on a fine scale.  They clearly know what they are looking for and know how to get it.

The probability of good one at random is low but the funny thing about cheaper guitars is the production volumes are high which increases the chances of one popping up.

[Electron Tornado]

1) I don't think there is any denying that those old Cremona builders set the benchmark for what a good violin should sound like, and how it should respond.  But that doesn't mean that, with the benefit of several hundred years' hindsight, people have not been able to learn from, and achieve, the build quality that such benchmarks represent.... 

...So, just because something involves arcane knowledge doesn't mean that no one else can acquire that knowledge.

Agree! Quality can be achieved, repeated, and surpassed. However, when market forces cause the focus to shift from quality to price point or profit with the same branding, the quality stuff can start to look mythical.

They never did say if that was a pre-CBS "Strad-O-Caster". 

2) For professional string players, the bow can often be as personal and important a device as the instrument itself.  The article did not say whether the test-musicians used their own preferred bow, or were supplied the same standardized one, so as to rule out contaminants.  If one used a bow that was not your personal choice, there is a very real possibility that it smushed together any potential differences i the responsiveness of the various violins.

3) The good part of the article, and study, linked to is that it involved players rather than merely listeners.  Not that good and knowledgeable listeners would be unable to tell the difference between "good" and characterless violins.  Rather, as a fundamentally mechanical device, the player has a better sense of whether the instrument allows them to reach the sonic objective they were aiming for at various points, which I think is a somewhat more stringent test than merely listening.  I'm sure any of us here would give the thumbs down to any high-priced guitar or bass if the neck or instrument balance didn't complement our preferred playing style, or allow us to hit the notes we wanted with the attack we wanted.

It would have been interesting to have both players and listeners being tested. With just players, it seems that some of the quality that players saw may lie in playability, which I think, would be even easier to achieve today.

Here's the old Visual Sound mythbuster video that used just a room of listeners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpTv2jAree8

However, they never did say if the bow used was a silverface or a blackface. (Let's hope no one tried to use a "Min'D Bow".)

[Mark Hammer]

I've probably said it here many times over the years, but if you're going to buy a cheap guitar, buy it from a bricks and mortar store where they have a lot of them in stock, so that you can try a bunch of them out and pick the "best" one.

[Rob Strand]

A well know issue when comparing two things of similar sound quality is people have a bias to pick the loudest one.   It's not a straight forward matter to  level violins and classical guitars in an acoustic setting.

It would have been interesting to have both players and listeners being tested. With just players, it seems that some of the quality that players saw may lie in playability, which I think, would be even easier to achieve today.

Good point.   The two experiments could be carried out in parallel.  For unbiased listening the players would have to play the same thing with the same emphasis which is tricky.  When you play something yourself you might dig in harder on different instruments because the sound takes you there but as the player you know you are doing it.

[mac]

Enjoy!

mac

[bartimaeus]

Since the resonant body of a violin contributes way more to its sound than the solid body of a tele, this really doesn't look good for the "perfection" of 50s fenders haha

It's also worth considering that even violinists are more forgiving towards changes than guitarists. Few violinists these days use gut strings (they use metal instead), even though originally that is how the stradivari were strung. Modern violinists also use fine-tuners on the e-string. And it's not unusual for the tuning pegs, tailpiece, fingerboard, and other bits to have been changed over the centuries.

Maybe it just takes centuries to see what aspects of an instrument make it special, and which can be changed without noticeable effect... but I hope not 

[PRR]

... 400-500 years... Humans in general probably haven't improved over that time span, so the distribution of raw talent/genius from the 1600s is probably about the same as today,....

Aside from trends in talent/genius--- there are 20 times as many people alive today as in 1700AD. If there was one Antonio Stradivari then, there should be 20 of them now. Also in the 1700s about 98% of all people were isolated farmers unable to spend much time studying music or woodwork. Today half the world "could" go into a skilled trade.

Debate and A/B testing of Strads vs good later instruments is a very old time-sink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius#Comparisons_in_sound_quality

BTW I believe that most or all the Strads in active service today have been extensively re-built, for wear/tear, glue-rot, and to keep up with changes of musical taste and pitch. (The neck of the Jupiter Stradivarius has been replaced 5 times, while the face varnish appears to be original.)

[dennism]

And let's not forget that all of this stuff that we are discussing pretty much only matters to musicians (and effect pedal builders/users).   99% of the audience members don't care what guitar/violin/fuzz pedal.... the musician is using.   As long as it's loud enough to hear and remotely in tune, that's all they care about.    Along with a good beat and a catchy vocal melody.

[R.G.]

I've probably said it here many times over the years, but if you're going to buy a cheap guitar, buy it from a bricks and mortar store where they have a lot of them in stock, so that you can try a bunch of them out and pick the "best" one.

It needs saying more.
When I bought my Strat, I went to a local music store that had a wall of Strats, on the order of twenty, hanging on the wall. I told them that I'd be there for a while, demonstrated that I could handle the merchandise without destroying it, and proceeded to play every single one. I realize that what I was testing was mostly setup and neck feel, but there was one in that batch that made my fingers love it when I played it. It was distinct, and repeatable. That is - it fit my preconceived notions of what I liked about a guitar. This was back in the Fender made in Japan days; the overall level of quality was high, but I liked ONE. That has persisted over the intervening time, and interviewing other guitars.

[marcelomd]

I think about this a lot.

Most good music was made with "whatever instrument was available". It sounded good because of how they were used, not because of what they were. 50 years later these instruments became holy relics. It is amusing there is a boutique industry based on copying old standard line items.

That said, wood is not uniform. There are no two blocks of wood that are equal. Instrument n and instrument n+1 may sound very different.

One day someone will develop a material that will sound as good as wood and can be tuned to your preference. Consistently.