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My wife is a professional violinist. (In Australia at least) if you've watched the news or a recent Australia movie, you would have heard her play. She says yo

by cpayne 10y ago

My wife is a professional violinist. (In Australia at least) if you've watched the news or a recent Australia movie, you would have heard her play. She says you can ALWAYS tell the difference. But she also says, "better" depends on the music. If you are playing a song on X-Factor or Australian Idol or even Christmas carols, then you'll never notice. If you are playing a solo for a classical piece (wedding or other ceremony), then it certainly sounds "different". Better is debatable, but different, yes

iheartmemcache 10y ago
Eh, I'm going to question her ability to identify the difference between a Strad and non-Strad based on this double blind study[1]. There's a lot of fetishism in the community on the Strad, probably to the joy of Christie's auctioneers worldwide. "The old growth trees in the region can't be sourced anymore". "no, it's the varnish. Your resonance is affected by both the chemical composition of the mix as well as the way it aged with the wood". I'd imagine if 5 of the best sawyers with 5 of the best luthiers and sound engineers in the world all sat down together with the goal of replicating the Strad's sound with 100% accuracy I'm confident the 'unique' sound of the Strad could be replicated. It might take a lot of time and maybe a few hundred k in equipment (a dozen condenser mics placed strategically at a variety of places within the room and near the instrument itself, some vibration analysis equipment on the equipment, etc), but eventually the sawyer will choose the right wood, the engineer would perform acoustic analysis and tell the luthier "ok, that 43 micron chisel shave you just took just did __, 22 more and we match the F# perfectly on the G string". I think it's very similar to the whole audiophile thing, where at least some of it is placebo. Those $30 monster cables aren't transmitting with any more signal fidelity than your $5 ones (assuming equal gauge copper, proper ohmic termination, blah blah), and I can sit down and prove it to anyone with $400 worth of spec-ans from the 1980s. Now the "different" vs "better" -- I love my record player but when audiophiles say 'it sounds better' than the raw mix-down digital masters, in terms of the amount of audible audio content objectively this isn't the case. (Edit: See [4]) It sounds different from what you're used to. You like the 'warmth' that a belt drive record through a 1950s speaker produces. You like the hisses and crackles and pops. It's an emotional connection you have. When I was playing guitar with my crappy band, I'd run my digital content through a Tascam quarter inch tape deck just to get that hiss in the tracks before we sent it down for mastering (we didn't have those fancy plug-ins to do it for us then). The same thing happened with film.[2] TV is generally shot at 30fps, film at 24fps[3]. When the FPS rate increased with the advent of more modern technology and higher sampling rates, people would claim that cinema didn't look 'cinematic'. The motion blur of the analog film experience we grew up with (well, those of us over 25) is something we mentally associated with the experience of going to the cinema. You saw a bunch of people comment on this with the Hobbit being distributed and shown at theatres at 48 FPS. "It just doesn't look right". -- [1]http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/ http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell... [2] I'm sorry I don't have a source on this study, but the phenomenon was pretty widespread. Cinema isn't something I've delved too far into but the cinematographer forums have thousands (literally) of threads on FPS discussion. [3] That's just historically how things broke down -- 24 was a convenient number to match up with actual seconds due to it's easy factorability, so you could get half a second at 12 frames, a quarter at 6, etc. This made it easy back in the day when post-processing involved actually involving cutting nitrate-based film and sound syncing to the video involved physically matching the snap of the clapper on your audio track to the visual of the actual frame of when the hinge closed. RE: 30 fps, I'm not sure, but I'd guess it had to do with the fact that we're at 60 hertz in the US so you could interlace half a frame a cycle (ie. trigger on the peak of every AC cycle to update the set of horizontal lines modulo two, so the electron gun presumably only had to hit half the lines within that time constraint) Other parts of the world operate at 50hz, which is why I'd imagine you have the PAL standard and 25 fps in those locales. (Pure speculation though, someone who's knows for sure, jump in.) [4] Operating under the assumption that that they were pressed from the same master source.. I'm limited only to the records I bought which were from bands with too small of a budget to afford two separate masters. (I.e., That mid-90s emo 200 run EP by Knapsack didn't have two masters, hell on tour they were lucky to have a floor to crash on.) Still, poster beneath me makes a very valid point that should be taken into consideration (Though I'm sure you're already aware of whether or not the band had a separate master DAT/master plate made if you like the band enough to care about the nuanced differences between two masters.)
- dcsommer 10y ago
  The study in [1] has a sample size of 10 in Paris, in one setting. I'd hardly call that conclusive or ruling out all the possible confounding variables.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Also known as "I am convinced this false thing is true, and will selectively demand higher levels of rigor from anything opposing my view than I ever have from anything supporting my view". I've read quite a bit about the blind violin studies, and don't see a way to dismiss it -- people were claiming instantly recognizable, impossible-to-miss massive differences in quality for the older violins. Yet nobody has been able to back up those claims with results; all results so far indicate that when the age and maker are obscured, identification by sound alone is no better than chance.
    - dcsommer 10y ago
      Personally, I do tend to think the difference is much harder to distinguish than tradition would dictate. These studies are evidence in that direction, in fact. But simply sampling 10 people is about as good as 10 anecdotes. > Also known as ... Please. What I've just written makes the rest of that sentence silly. There is no need to jump to conclusions.
      - owenversteeg 10y ago
        I agree with your point, and to make it worse some of those 10 people were from a previous, discredited study by the same authors. Funny enough two comments I made - on this thread, now dead - went from +2 to -4 very quickly. Another comment went from +5 to +2. I've got a pretty strong feeling that people love telling this anecdote about "science over art!" and ironically don't like it when it turns out the science is actually bad science. As a result, they're banding together and simply mass-downvoting things. There's an interesting debate to be had here, on the merits of the sounds of different instruments, and the linked NYT article is fascinating. Unfortunately, people seem to be caught up in a frenzy of linking bad science to each other instead of actually discussing violins, which are a personal passion of mine. I went into more detail on the bad science in my other comment here, which is going negative now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977
geebee 10y ago
That's an interesting observation. I'm an amateur violin player, but as I've started looking at middle tier instruments, I've already noticed that more expensive doesn't necessarily mean "better." Here's the thing, that doesn't mean the money goes nowhere, it just means it isn't measurably better, but it may mean more specialized and tailored to a particular set of acoustic priorities. There is, of course, some correlation between more expensive and better, I'm more talking about what happens once you've gotten away from the cheap mass produced instruments and even the decent but unremarkable student violins. Once you get up into a higher level, instruments may get expensive because you need a highly skilled craftsperson to bring out particular qualities in an instrument that may match up to what a musician needs. That sort of thing can't really be mass produced, and because it requires a lot of attention and construction time from a skilled person, it's expensive too. This holds true for a lot of things. For instance, what's actually "better", dinner at the french laundry, or a damn good burrito. The burrito actually isn't cheaper because it tastes worse, it's cheaper because it isn't as expensive to produce. This actually holds for a lot of things out there. More expensive isn't always "better", but interestingly, just because it isn't quantifiably better doesn't mean you aren't getting something for your money when you spend more, either. Sometimes more expensive means high quality and specifically tailored for a particular set of criteria.

by cpayne 10y ago

iheartmemcache 10y ago

Eh, I'm going to question her ability to identify the difference between a Strad and non-Strad based on this double blind study[1]. There's a lot of fetishism in the community on the Strad, probably to the joy of Christie's auctioneers worldwide. "The old growth trees in the region can't be sourced anymore". "no, it's the varnish. Your resonance is affected by both the chemical composition of the mix as well as the way it aged with the wood". I'd imagine if 5 of the best sawyers with 5 of the best luthiers and sound engineers in the world all sat down together with the goal of replicating the Strad's sound with 100% accuracy I'm confident the 'unique' sound of the Strad could be replicated. It might take a lot of time and maybe a few hundred k in equipment (a dozen condenser mics placed strategically at a variety of places within the room and near the instrument itself, some vibration analysis equipment on the equipment, etc), but eventually the sawyer will choose the right wood, the engineer would perform acoustic analysis and tell the luthier "ok, that 43 micron chisel shave you just took just did __, 22 more and we match the F# perfectly on the G string". I think it's very similar to the whole audiophile thing, where at least some of it is placebo. Those $30 monster cables aren't transmitting with any more signal fidelity than your $5 ones (assuming equal gauge copper, proper ohmic termination, blah blah), and I can sit down and prove it to anyone with $400 worth of spec-ans from the 1980s. Now the "different" vs "better" -- I love my record player but when audiophiles say 'it sounds better' than the raw mix-down digital masters, in terms of the amount of audible audio content objectively this isn't the case. (Edit: See [4]) It sounds different from what you're used to. You like the 'warmth' that a belt drive record through a 1950s speaker produces. You like the hisses and crackles and pops. It's an emotional connection you have. When I was playing guitar with my crappy band, I'd run my digital content through a Tascam quarter inch tape deck just to get that hiss in the tracks before we sent it down for mastering (we didn't have those fancy plug-ins to do it for us then). The same thing happened with film.[2] TV is generally shot at 30fps, film at 24fps[3]. When the FPS rate increased with the advent of more modern technology and higher sampling rates, people would claim that cinema didn't look 'cinematic'. The motion blur of the analog film experience we grew up with (well, those of us over 25) is something we mentally associated with the experience of going to the cinema. You saw a bunch of people comment on this with the Hobbit being distributed and shown at theatres at 48 FPS. "It just doesn't look right". -- [1]http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/ http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell... [2] I'm sorry I don't have a source on this study, but the phenomenon was pretty widespread. Cinema isn't something I've delved too far into but the cinematographer forums have thousands (literally) of threads on FPS discussion. [3] That's just historically how things broke down -- 24 was a convenient number to match up with actual seconds due to it's easy factorability, so you could get half a second at 12 frames, a quarter at 6, etc. This made it easy back in the day when post-processing involved actually involving cutting nitrate-based film and sound syncing to the video involved physically matching the snap of the clapper on your audio track to the visual of the actual frame of when the hinge closed. RE: 30 fps, I'm not sure, but I'd guess it had to do with the fact that we're at 60 hertz in the US so you could interlace half a frame a cycle (ie. trigger on the peak of every AC cycle to update the set of horizontal lines modulo two, so the electron gun presumably only had to hit half the lines within that time constraint) Other parts of the world operate at 50hz, which is why I'd imagine you have the PAL standard and 25 fps in those locales. (Pure speculation though, someone who's knows for sure, jump in.) [4] Operating under the assumption that that they were pressed from the same master source.. I'm limited only to the records I bought which were from bands with too small of a budget to afford two separate masters. (I.e., That mid-90s emo 200 run EP by Knapsack didn't have two masters, hell on tour they were lucky to have a floor to crash on.) Still, poster beneath me makes a very valid point that should be taken into consideration (Though I'm sure you're already aware of whether or not the band had a separate master DAT/master plate made if you like the band enough to care about the nuanced differences between two masters.)

dcsommer 10y ago
The study in [1] has a sample size of 10 in Paris, in one setting. I'd hardly call that conclusive or ruling out all the possible confounding variables.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Also known as "I am convinced this false thing is true, and will selectively demand higher levels of rigor from anything opposing my view than I ever have from anything supporting my view". I've read quite a bit about the blind violin studies, and don't see a way to dismiss it -- people were claiming instantly recognizable, impossible-to-miss massive differences in quality for the older violins. Yet nobody has been able to back up those claims with results; all results so far indicate that when the age and maker are obscured, identification by sound alone is no better than chance.
  - dcsommer 10y ago
    Personally, I do tend to think the difference is much harder to distinguish than tradition would dictate. These studies are evidence in that direction, in fact. But simply sampling 10 people is about as good as 10 anecdotes. > Also known as ... Please. What I've just written makes the rest of that sentence silly. There is no need to jump to conclusions.
    - owenversteeg 10y ago
      I agree with your point, and to make it worse some of those 10 people were from a previous, discredited study by the same authors. Funny enough two comments I made - on this thread, now dead - went from +2 to -4 very quickly. Another comment went from +5 to +2. I've got a pretty strong feeling that people love telling this anecdote about "science over art!" and ironically don't like it when it turns out the science is actually bad science. As a result, they're banding together and simply mass-downvoting things. There's an interesting debate to be had here, on the merits of the sounds of different instruments, and the linked NYT article is fascinating. Unfortunately, people seem to be caught up in a frenzy of linking bad science to each other instead of actually discussing violins, which are a personal passion of mine. I went into more detail on the bad science in my other comment here, which is going negative now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977

geebee 10y ago

That's an interesting observation. I'm an amateur violin player, but as I've started looking at middle tier instruments, I've already noticed that more expensive doesn't necessarily mean "better." Here's the thing, that doesn't mean the money goes nowhere, it just means it isn't measurably better, but it may mean more specialized and tailored to a particular set of acoustic priorities. There is, of course, some correlation between more expensive and better, I'm more talking about what happens once you've gotten away from the cheap mass produced instruments and even the decent but unremarkable student violins. Once you get up into a higher level, instruments may get expensive because you need a highly skilled craftsperson to bring out particular qualities in an instrument that may match up to what a musician needs. That sort of thing can't really be mass produced, and because it requires a lot of attention and construction time from a skilled person, it's expensive too. This holds true for a lot of things. For instance, what's actually "better", dinner at the french laundry, or a damn good burrito. The burrito actually isn't cheaper because it tastes worse, it's cheaper because it isn't as expensive to produce. This actually holds for a lot of things out there. More expensive isn't always "better", but interestingly, just because it isn't quantifiably better doesn't mean you aren't getting something for your money when you spend more, either. Sometimes more expensive means high quality and specifically tailored for a particular set of criteria.