3 ms·

Not that this should necessarily be the final word on the matter, but a recent controlled study suggested that even experienced players can't distinguish old fr

• corin_ 15y ago
  It's an interesting study, but it's worth noting that it wasn't necessarily a great study, only 3 (I think) "old" violins were used, and performers actually bond with their instruments, you'd expect a considerably different playing experience after you've been using a single instrument for a while and got to know it fully. Of course, this doesn't mean their results were incorrect, just that they weren't entirely conclusive. Ultimately you wouldn't expect violinists to be able to tell the difference between old and new, just good and bad. It would be astonishing if every single old violin was better than every single new one. So other than the fact that price may not always corrolate with quality (what else is new, this happens in any market, from computers to cars to clothes), I'm not sure if it means that much. There's actually an old story I love, that afaik isn't true. A concert violinist got so tired of people constantly praising his stradivarius rather than him for his performances that one day he played an entire concert with a fake, a copy of his strad. The audience of course had no idea, and went mad for him at the end, then he put the violin on the floor and jumped up and down on it, before giving a speech about his point.