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Furthermore, knowing that it's a Strad or an Amati or a Guarnerius could make it sound better.

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ORIGINAL: timoteo

- it's really hard to do a 'blind' comparison with someone who has played a Strad and knows what they sound like. They will immediately know which is which, and even if they're completely honest with themselves they might tend to favor the Strad since it's familiar and is the de facto definition of how a violin should sound.

And someone who hasn't played a Strad and doesn't know what they sound like is hardly an expert that the classical music crowd would take seriously ...

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Million-dollar Strads fall to modern violins in blind ‘sound check’
By Adrian ChoMay. 9, 2017 , 2:15 PM
Perhaps no name conveys superiority quite like Stradivarius. The roughly 650 extant violins fashioned by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) and his family are worth millions, and they’re thought to outshine even the best modern instruments. But in a pair of "double-blind" tests, in which neither musician nor audience knew which instrument was played, listeners clearly preferred the new fiddles to the old classics.
"The work is terrific," says Christopher Germain, a violinmaker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a member of the board of the Violin Society of America, who was not involved in the study. "I think it's really helpful to everybody to cut through the folklore and b.s. and focus on what we're hearing."
For more than a century, violins crafted by Stradivari and members of his family have been thought to possess acoustic qualities that new violins simply can’t match. (Violins fashioned contemporaneously by members of the Guarneri family are similarly revered.) For just as long, aficionados have sought Stradivari's secret—was it his varnish or the type of wood he used? None of the countless suggestions has drawn a consensus. Nevertheless, the price of a Stradivarius keeps soaring. In 2011, the “Lady Blunt” Strad sold for $15.9 million.
But some scientists and violinmakers question whether Strads and other "Old Italians" really have superior acoustic qualities. For decades, blind comparisons have shown that listeners cannot tell them from other violins, and acoustic analyses have revealed no distinct sonic characteristics. In 2014, Claudia Fritz, a musical acoustician at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, and Joseph Curtin, a leading violinmaker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, reported that in a double-blind test with 13 modern instruments and nine Old Italians, 10 elite violinists generally preferred the new violins to the old.
Now, the team has shown that listeners also prefer new instruments—at least when considering a specific small set of fine violins. The researchers started by looking at a quality considered unique to Strads: They are supposed to sound quieter “under the ear" of the violinist, but project better into the concert hall “as if somehow the inverse-square law were reversed," Curtin says, referring to how the loudness of a sound decreases as the distance from the source increases.
The first listener test took place in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris. Researchers gathered three Strads and three top-quality modern violins. An elite violinist played the same musical excerpt—for example, five measures from Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto Opus No. 35—on each of the nine possible pairings of violins. Then, a second violinist played a different excerpt on all the pairs, with the order scrambled. The violinists wore modified welding goggles, so they couldn’t tell whether they were playing old or new instruments.
As the violins played solo and with orchestral accompaniment, 55 listeners rated which instrument in each pair projected better by making a mark on a continuous scale with one violin, labeled simply A, on one end and the other violin, labeled B, on the other. The researcher then averaged all those evaluations, and found that subjects generally thought the new violins projected better than the old ones—although the researcher left it up to listeners to decide what that meant. The effect was unambiguous, Fritz says.
The team then performed a similar test in New York City without the orchestra and with a different set of Strads and new violins. Again, the 82 listeners in the test reported that the new violins projected better. This time, Fritz and colleagues asked subjects which of the two violins in a pairing they preferred. Listeners chose the new violins over the old, they reported yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The New York City study also showed that listeners' preferences correlated with their assessment of projection, suggesting the loudness of an instrument may be a primary factor in the quality of its sound.
So, will the study cause Strad prices to plummet? No, Curtin says, as the value of the instruments is based on much more than just their sound. But it does suggest that violinists can get a top-quality instrument without spending a fortune on an Old Italian, he says. (The record price for an instrument by a modern maker is a relatively cheap $132,000.) "It's good news for players," Curtin says.
The finding also leaves open the possibility that Strads do sound better than modern instruments under certain circumstances—when the listener knows they are hearing a legendary instrument. "If you know it's a Strad, you will hear it differently," Fritz says. "And you can't turn off that effect."
As for Stradivari's secret, the whole notion is misguided, Germain says. "Stradivari's secret was that he was a genius and that he did a thousand things right, not one thing right," Germain says. Saying his success came down to just one trick is, Germain says, "like saying that if I had the same kind of paint as Michelangelo, I could have painted the Sistine Chapel."

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They fascinate not only musicians and music lovers but also researchers: the violins that Antonio Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù built in the first half of the 18th century. Various experiments should explore where their special sound comes from. The lacquer , the chemical pretreatment of the wood, or even the small ice age , which influenced the trees, were already used for explanation.
But now French and American researchers have questioned the basic idea that the old Italian violins are superior to modern ones. According to her test with 21 musicians, this is not really the case, reports the team in the specialist magazine "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" .
The scientists around Claudia Fritz from the University of Paris asked their subjects in a darkened hotel room during the international violin contest in Indianapolis. In addition, the musicians set up a dark welding goggle so that they could not see the violins. A little perfume under the chinrest concealed the wood odor of the instruments.
Subjects with Stradivari experience
Most of the test players were professional musicians, the youngest was 20, the oldest 65 years old. The participants played violin for 15 to 61 years, their own instruments had a value of 1400 to 7.7 million euro - because among the participants also found musicians with Stradivari or Guarneri violin.
For the test, the researchers had provided six violins. Three were old Italian violins - one by Guarneri del Gesù, two by Antonio Stradivari. The three new models were a few days to years old. Before the experiment, the scientists had chosen from a larger collection of new violins the three which, in their opinion, sounded most impressive and clearly distinguished themselves from each other.
According to the researchers, the three old violins are worth ten million dollars - about a hundred times as much as the three new instruments.
Blind test: old against new
In a first experiment the musicians were given a new and an old violin - which the players did not know. On each instrument they were allowed to play for a minute. Then they should say which one is more pleasing to them. The violinists tested each possible pair of new and old, one even double. As a result, the musicians decided to go for a new violin. This was mainly due to the fact that a model was particularly rarely favored - a Stradivari built around the year 1700.
But was the decision of the violinists at all constant? A violin pair each musician received a second time during this test, without knowing this. Eleven subjects chose the same violin as the first, ten, but for the other. A sign that the instruments differ from the quality so little that the choice is made randomly - or that the test conditions were perhaps not optimal, the researchers note.
In the second part of the test, the musicians got a chance to deal with the six instruments longer. They were then able to play on each of the violins for as long as they wanted, and also to choose between the violins. Afterwards the musicians should say which instrument they would like to take home with them. They should also name the best and the worst model in four categories that Geiger use to evaluate instruments - modulation ability of sound colors, response, playability and load bearing capacity.
Again, there were no clear tendencies. Each instrument has been chosen as favorite by at least one participant. And apart from one, each landed in the four categories both front and rear. Only one of the new violins found much above-average appeal. And the Stradivari, which was the least popular in the first run, was once more behind.
Sound detected? Wrong!
Whether their favorite was a new violin or an old Italian model, the musicians could only guess. Seven said immediately that they had no idea, seven were guessing - and lying next to it. Only three had the right nose. The remaining four participants did not answer.
The fact that the violins of the Italian masters clearly outmoded modern models can only be asserted with difficulty after this study. The blind test rather suggests that a psychological effect helps the venerable violin to lasting fame. If you play or listen to a violin that is worth millions and is surrounded by an aura of superiority, this particular experience is so fascinating that the sound is beautifully beautiful Must be effective. Thus, the blushing blind test would hardly end the myth of the old violins.