Multiply that figure by ten to get somewhere close - five grand will only get you a run-of-the-mill student fiddle!
That may be so, but one might well also find a £5k instrument which you actually prefer to a £50k one if you’re not told the prices beforehand - I’ve certainly found that to be the case with guitars. Again, we should not jump to conclusions in the absence of the necessary careful research, and unfortunately musical acoustics is not really high enough profile to acheive much funding, as I found out!
Yes, it’s possible to find them. But you have to go searching for a very long time indeed. The vast majority of £50k fiddles are quickly chosen over the £5k ones by the vast majority of violinists in that situation. This isn’t me jumping to conclusions, this is from seeing exactly this situation many times. (When you’re down to the £1-£5k range, the correlation between price and preference markedly lessens.)
I can give you a lot of examples of how crazy collectioners and museums can be.
A few examples:
A silver coffeepot, 18the century: auctioned for the equivalent of 1, 250,000 (now in a museum). A porcelain coffeecup and its dish (Dutch Eastern-Indian Company): 650,000. A little plump pharmacist’s vessel (15the century): 1/2 million.
A piece of furniture like you think is not going much: Flemish cabinet, 17the century: close to 4 million (also bought by a museum).
This are only a few examples of what goes on in circles of private collectioners, antique merchants and sometimes - luckely- also museums. Where there is a public for a merchandise, you can make money of it. If you don’t get the price you have in mind, you withdraw it and wait for an other public. It is as simple as that.
I’m not convinced that prices of instruments will go down suddenly and in a dramatic way when there are good modern copies made available. They shall at least always keep their value as antiquities.
I don’t know about that research, but I am inclined to think that varnish is varnish. But maybe when made the “old” way it is in some subtle way more “flexible” then when you put a very strong/resistent modern varnish on a violin.
(Lucky for me I escaped medical study after one semester. Doubtful I would have have survived chemistry and other such difficult exams.)
Salaam. A
MMM… Oh well… Now that I re-read my post I must confess: That coffeepot was 2 centuries older. (Who cares about 200 years more or less at that age.)
I’m still recovering from that cup and dish though… This was genuily crazy and funny to follow. In the end the lady bidding on it was close to tears because the other guy had it. Like I say: where there is a public, you get quite a few crazy people gathering too.
Salaam. A
Yes, GM and Alde, I certainly bow to your first-hand experience with real-life violin valuations, and clearly one would need a good reason to part with £50k instead of £5k!
I think we’re getting onto minutiae here so I’ll politley take my leave unless there’s any more specific questions of a more technical or ‘scientific’ nature, but I think this has been an extremely useful thread altogether, so kudos to everyone involved. (Luckily none of your Googling uncovered any of my research, although the Catgut Acoustical Journal came close - that would’ve been a little embarassing!)
Who says such a thing? Not me. I only give a few examples of how things go crazy once you enter the circles of the Crazy Collectors and mention that I don’t see sudden extinction of the species.
So what is all your sudden complaining about? We are restrainment inpersonate here 
I have a lot of questions about that, actually. But since no sientist I have no clue how to describe them first of all, and secondly no idea how to write that down. (It would therefore have been intersting when the mod declared this thread leaning towards GD and got rid of it out of his domain. Others-with-questions could have done all that difficult writing for me).
Same here. I found your contributions especifially very interesting. Though a bit difficult to comprehend/follow for me, being not any sort of scientist in scientific matters involving wood behaviour and acoustics or anything “physics”. Especially when written in this language and involving things like figures and other complicates calculations. But handicaps are things of life.
Did you gave a link to an article of yours? I only saw a link to an article from which you said it was written by someone you worked with on our reasearch. (Seems to me I can not google your membername and end up with a publication like you came to mention here.)
Salaam. A
[…]
I think, there is more to it, but nothing mythical.
…at blind tests…
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A violin is a “machine” which converts muscle tensions and movements into sounds, hence the player and his/her specific motoric “abilities” and “preferences” have considerable influence on the sound of the instrument.
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Every good instrument provides the player vith a very wide spectrum of possible nuances of tone. (Just listen to Gidon Kremer playing Isayes’ solo sonatas as an example of extreme wide Variety)
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Every top rank player has his/her personal opinion and desire how he/she wants to sound and the ability to produce exactly that sound. If the instrument is good enough the player will produce a sound which comes as close as possible to the sound he/she wants (by choosing contact point, bow speed, very subtle differences in intonation, the dynamic during single notes and complete phrases etc.)
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Given the points above the influence of the player on the sound in a blind test will be much higher than the properties of the instrument itself. Hence IMO these blind tests don’t tell us very much about the sound quality of good instruments. I daresay I’d be able to distinguish Perlman and Kremer in a blind test, but hardly Kremer playing a Strad or a Del Gesu or a top rank modern instrument.
…at “break in” of instruments…
Here I suppose you were looking at the wrong place.
A violin is a very complex device (acoustcally). It’s sound and response depends on a quite big number of physical values:
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The quality of the wood of the plates, ribs, neck and scroll as well as the inner blocks and linings.
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Thickness and arching of the plates
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weight and volume of neck and scroll
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Tension in all parts introduced by the tension of the strings and the position and length of the soundpost (the force with which the soundpost is inserted before the strings are mounted is not a constant, every violinmaker does it slightly different), as well as tension introduced by glueing the parts together.
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Now take into consideration, that , for example, moving the soundpost just fractions of a millimeter can change sound and reponse noticeable, that wood is a “living” material, that furthermore spruce is rather soft and will give way a little thus reducing tensions in some areas. This suggests, that the instrument’s sound and response will change over time, even if it is not played. This does not imply that the frequency response of the plates themself changes.
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Given the above, it can be assumed, that the type of change will depend on the force applied to the parts and the joints of the instrument. These forces are different between a quiet and a played instrument and I suppose that the distribution of tension in a violin is not a constant (just consider the fact, that temperature and air humidity have a measurable influence on the frequency response of a violin).
Summary: If the abovementioned is correct, a new instrumen will:
a) change it’s behavior if it is played for some time
This change may or may not depend whether the instrument is played by a master who gets all out of it which is possible or an average or poor performing amateur. (I suppose it will depend, but that will have to be proved)
b) change it’s behavior as well if it is just stored for the same time with it’s strings tuned, but the change will be different.
c) An instrument which has undergone procedure a) might again change it’s behavior if it is stored for some time without being played.
All the points above are just a hypothesis and will require exact measurements to be verified or falsified. Years ago I did some research together with a violin maker in Vienna as follows:
We measured the frequency response of a perfectly tuned brand new instrument over a frequency range from 100 to 10000 Hz and plotted the responce curve. Then I played this violin for a month about an hour per day, and after that we measured the frequency reponse again. The response curve was very similar, but the maxima had shifted - in the range below 1500 Hz in direction to lower frequencies and above 2000 Hz slightly in direction to higher frequencies. I do not offer this as a proof, because the changes were in a range which could as well be caused by inaccuracies in the setup of the experiment and we had neither the time nor the money to refine the setup and repeat them often enough to be sure.
I just suggest, that a lot of research must be done in this area before any final conclusion can be made.
just my $0.02
I saw this recent story and did think about reviving this thread but decided not to bother. But the latest test certainly seems to back the test I cited earlier in the thread. As I think someone on Fark put it, it seems that Stradivari (et al) are the Monster cables of stringed instruments.
FTFY:
It seems that Stradivari (et al) are thePearcables of stringed instruments.
wow, this was a dead thread.
my 2 cents (adjusted for inflation):
i read an article breaking down the various tonal values and claims, and basically there’s no honest “Stradivarius” unaltered violins really left in some unadulterated form. the biggest factor being that each generation had to change various aspects of the intrument to keep it in working order, (redo the fretboard, change the neck, etc) which all would then adjust the tonal qualities to suit the current era of musical flavor.
the article was in Skeptic Magazine.
on a similarly interesting note: i read someplacethat Stradivari used 17th century alchemists to devise the shellac.
A well conducted (though rather small) blind test suggests that : “Old, expensive violins are not always better than new, cheap ones”
I find it interesting that Ralph’s spelling hasn’t improved in 8 years…
Moving to Cafe Society from GQ.
Please note this is an old thread.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Since the thread started an excellent book on the subject appeared. Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection by Tony Faber.
Faber goes through all the history and all the science and talks to people who play the instruments and those who try to duplicate them or better them. It’s all very readable, too.
That’s not quite a fair comparison. A $100 Monster cable (or a $7000 Pear cable) performs exactly as well as the cheapest fines cable that a dollar can buy. The Stradivari instruments, in this study, were compared to some of the best modern instruments, which cost five or six figures easily. That’s a lot less than the seven or eight figures that the best Stradivari or Guaneri instruments can command, but it’s still a hell of a lot more than the $50 machined POS violin that you hand to small children.
The Stradivari and Guaneri violins are astonishingly good, but so are the best modern instruments.
Very cool. But it would have been nice to know the identity of the modern violins.
Well, so much for violins. Is sax as good as it used to be?
The key point is that the claims made seem to be unfounded. Nobody, anywhere, has ever said merely that Stradivari are better than a machined POS violin. The claim always was that they are the creme de la creme, and better than anything modern. That claim appears to be false.