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In Reply to: Interesting article on blind testing. posted by Charles Hansen on September 20, 2008 at 14:10:45:
That is a very interesting article and I have some real world experience to relate to this.
My ex-girlfriend is a professional violinist and I have had the rare pleasure of living with a real live Strad for about 1 year as well as a Guarneri Del Gesu and a Guadagnini (in fact for about 1 week she had all three at the same time and thus the tests). In addition she had a Strad copy from the late 1700s (it turns out that they were heavily copied).
First; the subjective characters of the four violins was radically different, particularly the Guarneri which was quite dark sounding. The Strad had incredible projection power and the Guadagnini a beautiful light tone but not really powerful sounding. The Strad copy sounded different depending on the weather conditions, sometimes fantastic other times much less so.
Second; Their harmonic spectra were dramatically different. I measured this with her playing the same note on each instrument with a 1/6th octave spectrum analyzer. We tried to keep the intensity of the note roughly constant as well (within a few db was possible). The harmonic patterns were different for each instrument. So a clearly measurable difference existed with each instrument.
Third: Once I was trained to easily diffentiate the violins (I could tell which one she was playing while I was in a different room, ie. blind) she showed me another trick: the BOW made each violin sound different again; however, this was far more subtle than the violins themselves. She had two bows, one was a bit more fleixble but heavier and the other more stiff and light. She preferred what the heavier bow did for more Romantic works and the light stiff one for rapid pieces like Paganini caprices.
Four: I can guarantee that the average audiophile would have no chance at identifying these traits blind. It took many months of exposure and daily hearing these instruments for me to develop the acuity to discern these things and that was ONLY because I really wanted to! IMO, this level of discernment is never achieved by most audiophiles and explains why one man's heaven is another man's hell. Could I be fooled by a good modern violin? Probably because I was never really exposed to them (she always had the good fortune and talent to attract people willing to lend old classic instruments to her to play) but I am sure that given exposure time I could discern some traits that make them different. However; I would point out that there was no clear trend between all of these old violins...they all simply sounded different but the Strad really stood out as a sound cannon! It could pressurize the room and get your ears pulsating. The Guarneri could not do this and only rarely could the others. With the Strad no problem. We also had a cheap ($2000) modern Romanian violin that she was babysitting for a friend of hers. The sound? Not even like a violin but what it looks like...a hollow box of wood.
Personally, I am not surprised that modern violins sound really good or even preferrable to old ones as the knowledge of making them was not lost and the craftsmen today are just as dedicated to the art. However; it does appear that the wood used then vs. now is different in terms of the cell structure density.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Interesting article on blind testing. - morricab 08:28:43 09/22/08 (1)
- The arguement for... - mkuller 12:52:17 09/22/08 (0)
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