Supposedly this site contains a database of extant Stradivarii.
In re-reading this thread, it does occur to me that this is a bit of a pissing match with no possible outcome. ( We ARE in G.Q., after all ). Tonal judgement is competely subjective and always will be. That’s why there are performance competitions that are judged by human beings.
You can play the perfect A. And, you can play so perfectly on the beat that you could have a string quartet all play the identical notes at exactly the same time for an entire piece. ( it’s a rather amazing and haunting sound. I heard it a few years ago. Can’t remember the composition. Somewhere in a thread it was identified… )
I apologize if I was overly strident in presenting what it is I’ve seen and heard. I suppose all that matters it that the music created with the device is pleasing to the ear. 
Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time? (Albeit not a string quartet!)
You could have the same discussions and achieve the same outcome with dowsers and astrologers.
Even as a non-musician I highly recommend Stradivari’s Genius : Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection,by Toby Faber.
He covers, in beautifully written detail, the history of violins, the creation of the various instruments by Stradivarius over the course of his lifetime and the differences in sound and tone among them, the competing masters, the changing fortunes in their use and purchase, who made them famous and why, today’s opinions of Strads by leading violinists, why some are thought to be nearing the end of their useful lifetimes, and whether the newer violins will ever be thought to be their equal. He also examines some of the theories behind the reason Strads are thought to sound so good. It’s not the varnish, BTW. And yes, he says the Strads are really worth their value, at least for particular musicians with particular instruments.
I disagree ( of course. 
). You pick up a violin, you are a brilliantly accomplished musician, nobody can possibly debate the fact that as you draw a bow across strings, music is made. Whether it is to YOUR liking or MY liking can be debated. However, pleasant sounds are made.
Astrologers cannot offer proof. A bow makes vibrations occur on the strings. That is irrefutable and a fact. The violin resonates and produces sound. Also irrefutable.
Both dowsers and astrologers make their bread by dint of coincidence, lacking any irrefutable proof.
I remember coming across that, can’t recall where. It makes sense to me. Different materials - and materials that are variable in quality - affect the sounds produced from them. It’s certainly true of some of the wind instruments. Why shouldn’t it be true of the string instruments? Not to mention that how good a (wood, metal and strings; not electronic) piano sounds depends on the soundingboard. No two sound entirely alike, you know. I prefer my electronic piano to the baby grand at the church I currently attend; it has a lousy sounding board - one of the worst I’ve ever encountered in such a piano. And one of the best sounding boards I can recall having my hands on was in an (antique) square grand that was badly out of tune, and an unappreciated heirloom.
What I’d like to see happen is for some very good instrument maker to make violins out of several different kinds of denser woods, and see how they turned out.
My throwaway comment was admittedly overly terse and obscure. What I meant was that if you hang around with a bunch of believers and ask them about their subjective experience of whatever they believe in they will (surprise surprise) tell you that experience irrefutably supports whatever it is they believe. They will also tell you why this works and why that works, passing on years, decades, centuries of “wisdom”, little or none of it tested in any meaningful way, just passed on like echoing ducks’ quacks.
This is, as you say, GQ.
The only testing of which I am aware (see the other thread) suggests that the subjective experience of blinded listeners is that actual strads aren’t much better and may be worse to listen to than a good modern copy a few months old.
And yet Strads sound so good because they are “played in” and get their tone “from the age of the wood” yada yada yada…
I’ll agree with Princhester that some talk about violins can be old wives’ tales. However, something that tends to get overlooked is that a violin is a moving thing, and there’s extremely fine feedback from the physical action. This in turn gives an instrument individual characteristics not in terms of the qualities of individual sounds, but as something used to produce music. Two instruments could have indistinguishable sounds when single notes are played, yet still feel very different from one another to a player. And musicians have a long and close relationship with their instruments. So, the question of ‘do Strads tend to enable violinists to produce better music’ isn’t one easily answered by a blind test (and obviously is even more subjective than the ones answered so far!)
FWIW, Faber in his Strad book gives the little ice age theory exactly one sentence. He doesn’t believe it.
You have of course said this before. You are yet to explain satisfactorily why you believe it to be true.
If one were simply to conduct a few tests as was conducted exactly as here except instead of asking the audience to rate tone and power, just ask them to rate which violin produced better music, you would have your answer. Either “better music” is something people can hear or it is not. If not, it’s meaningless, and if so, people can say whether they think one performance or another is better music, without knowing which violin is being played.
To be a fair test, it’s not good enough just to ensure that the audience don’t know which instrument is being played. Because it’s not possible for a violinist to spend the time with each instrument to develop the familiarity with it necessary for them to feel confident in producing the best music from it, without destroying the ‘blindness’ of the comparison. Either you’d have to find a player who claims to be able to produce the best music they can from instruments they’ve never touched before, or find one who’s incapable of distinguishing between a Strad and a modern fiddle.
Why? There’s no reason the test musician/s couldn’t be people who have played both instruments for a suitable familiarising period. You are creating artificial difficulties.
I quite accept that this would be only a single blinded test. It doesn’t matter. If Strad’s produce “better music” (or “worse music”) because musicians play them better (or worse), fine. A single blind test will show that to be true (or not).
‘Suitable familiarising period’ is potentially many years. That’s not an artificial difficulty.
Agreed. From what I hear when visiting family, they do in fact alter how they play in subtle ways, depending upon which fiddle they are playing.
It would be a bizarre test to hand a musician two instruments they’d never seen before and tell them to play identical passages, because a part of what we hear when we hear a performance is a beautiful human/instrument interface. That comes with time and endless practice.
Feh. Is so. You only have to think about it for about five seconds to realise that anyone who plays a Strad is going to be good enough that they played other instruments for years before that. So after they’ve played on the Strad for a few years, they are familiar with two instruments.
It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that in the above linked test, after the main event, Karvay played a piece on the Strad and a piece on the copy in full view of the audience. He’d only been playing on the copy for a few weeks. The audience members wrongly picked the copy as being the Strad by a ratio of five to one approximately. An audience, I might add, with a very high level of expertise.
There is no objective evidence at all that the value of Strads comes from their ability to produce better music, tone or power. Their value (above good modern instruments) comes from being celebrated antiques.