> 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.
It is well known that equal loudness is crucial for nuanced A-B testing with sound and often a PITA to get right. (and vice versa, PR A-B tests of some audio "enhancers" or simply toggling the ones of your soundcard often use this trick and nodge up volume a bit with effects on)
I make acoustic guitars from scratch. There's an old joke in the luthier community about customer preference : "give 'em a choice between volume and tone, and they'll pick volume every time."
It's funny because it's often true. The loud guitars sell first.
Then again, it may depend on your market. A solo performer can sacrifice a lot of volume for a tone that matches their expectations. A performer who plays in a bluegrass band with a fiddle and a banjo needs every db they can get. But this is the acoustic instrument market.
Your typical bluegrass guitarist probably cares more about volume than most others because bluegrass bands still insist on crowding around a single mic for some reason.
Agreed. It's further complicated by subjective loudness not being a simple function of sound pressure level. So, if you adjust two signals to equal subjective loudness in an AB test, is it really a fair test?
I suspect there was a period when the older ones were better, even if this was mostly a matter of taste and survivorship bias. Bad violins and bad violin makers are forgotten to history while the very best ones (as judged by the very best players and orchestras) gradually gained stature and people exposed to those instruments decided the way they happened to sound was how fine violins are supposed to sound.
The trouble is, new violins kept getting better. A more interesting question might be when the quality of the new ones surpassed that of the older ones. I'd like to see a blind test rating that included new violins from 1990, 2000, 2010... Was there one particular step-change in quality that made a big difference, or was it just lots of mundane little changes?
You can see the same sort of thing with other instruments of creative professions, too. Like, look at machine tools.
Modern lathes are made tough, well, and often with features like CNC attachments. But the 'old iron' behemoths produced by South Bend in the 1920s are also still running and performing precise work day-in, day-out. They'll probably continue to do so for a very long time, and they'll still blow a modern introductory benchtop model out of the water.
Is it really that the old models were in some way 'perfect', or is it just that we tend to be impressed by bespoke works which continue to perform outstandingly over the ravages of time? Maybe it appeals to a sense that we could someday overcome the transience of our possessions.
I guess that's sort of an existentially futile goal to chase, but it would be nice in the context of things like batteries and plastic junk.
Well, if it's at all like wine tasting then I have to suspect a significant group of people can tell the difference. It's just not me.
With wine tasting I agree that 90%+ can't detect most differences, but there are plenty of people who could accurately guess varietals, often regions (because they grow their grapes and make their wine differently), and certainly age (because oak and oxidation have very obvious effects).
Whenever I hear that someone couldn't tell the difference between red wine and died white wine I have to laugh... it's not that I could really tell you what exact type of white some thing was, but that the wine making styles (even fermentation yeast) are so different along with the use of oak and lack of tannins that it's hilarious to make the mistake. On the other hand, cheap bad wine could taste like any damn thing other than (probably) good wine.
Have I blind tasted? Yes, and I couldn't tell you the dollar value of wine between $10-100 because people will charge what the market will bear. However, if you can't taste the difference between a decent Red Burgundy, California Zinfandel, and a Merlot-Cab or between a decent Chablis and a Sav Blanc then you probably just don't care. They smell very different, have different acidity and sugar levels, bitterness, oak vanillins... In a blind test I've seen 8/10 amateurs get every one of 4 wine varietals correct (the others were 2/4) based on a short description, which is well beyond chance.
> I have to suspect a significant group of people can tell the difference. It's just not me.
Various research seems to have been done on wine tasting, but I don't think I've ever heard of a study that wound up supporting this. They always seem to find that experienced, respected tasters can't tell a red from a white, or rate the same wine differently depending on where they're told its from, and so forth.
Is there any persuasive evidence around that wine tasting isn't more or less bunk?
It is very difficult to tell the difference between some reds and some whites. It's a bit like telling the difference between red cheddar and white cheddar. However, anybody could tell the difference between a young cabernet sauvignon and a reisling -- anybody. Go ahead and try it if you don't believe me.
Is there anyone who can distinguish between any two wines? No. Are there wines that anyone can distinguish between? Yes. Are there some people who can distinguish between a greater set of wines than other people? Yes.
Probably most people who are inexperienced with wine would be surprised at how many wines they could identify with a little bit of practice. Probably most people who are experienced with wine would be surprised at how many wines they fail to identify despite their considerable practice. But failing to identify a wine when you are sure you got it right is at least half of the fun.
It's a competition rather than research, but is consistent with both some people being better than others and some wines being more distinctive than others.
Quality distinctions are a bit hard to talk about, being qualitative. How do you differentiate between changing tastes/moods or inconsistent wineries?
The competition the economist article was about was judged (by them) purely in correctly identifying the grape and country of origin of the wine.
This is more resistant against noise, but only supports the idea that people can reliably identify wines — not that they can be graded independently. It certainly challenges the “wine judges can’t tell the difference between red and white” narrative.
Sure, yeah. I mean naively, one would expect that some grapes or qualitative aspects can be reliably discerned, and others can't, and that research into the subject would give us some idea which is which, so that's the kind of thing I thought someone might know about.
I mean, it may not all be bunk, but at any rate it seems fairly non-obvious which bits aren't. It seems like every study that asks "are wine tasters biased by X?" finds that they are.
Unless I'm reading the abstract incorrectly, 10% of judges were consistent, 10% were consistent within the top 3, and 80% were terrible. Being a home brewer of beer, this matches my experience pretty closely. Surely, this supports the idea that some people are more skilled than others, though.
Per the popular article I read, he found that ~10% of the judges were consistent in a given competition, but it wasn't the same 10% across competitions. To decide what this implies I guess one would have to figure out whether 10% is higher or lower than you'd expect by chance.
(That said, it sounds like he chose his definition of "consistent" after gathering the data, so it doesn't sound like it was a very rigorous process. One could say he found 10% of the judges were consistent, or one could say that he defined "consistent" to mean "within the top 10%".)
White and red? Are there some white wines that taste a lot like reds? Because those wines I know (4-30€ range) the whites taste nothing like reds. It's like saying in a blind test people can't tell the differences between cola and sprite.
I was hand-waving there. From the study I had in mind:
> A white wine artificially colored red with an odorless dye was olfactory described as a red wine by a panel of 54 tasters. Hence, because of the visual information, the tasters discounted the olfactory information..
To be clear I didn't mean to expressly claim that "experts cannot tell a red from a white", for any particular interpretation of those words. I mean generally that every time I've ever heard of a study examining whether wine-tasters consistently discern what they think they're discerning, the result is always that they don't.
Buy a bag of cheap gummy candies, with multiple colors of candy. Separate the colors. Taste each color in turn, and write a description of the flavor that matches that color.
Now put on a blindfold, and have a confederate hand you randomly selected candies. For each sample, describe the flavor.
For certain brands (or lack thereof), it is readily apparent that all colors are actually the same flavor, and any distinctions that may occur in the initial descriptions are all illusionary. Some brands actually do have distinct flavors. At some point, someone figured out "hey, we could save money by not using 5 different flavoring blends, and most people wouldn't even notice."
And it's not the smelling or tasting part that changes. It happens when you try to describe it. That's why "blue raspberry" is so wrong on your shaved ice. Raspberry is not a "blue" flavor. It's "red". But on the shelf, the red spectrum is already cluttered with cherry, strawberry, and watermelon. Apple has to be green, and raspberry has to be blue, so the ice jerk doesn't have to read labels. And you then have to close your eyes to make it taste more correct--or at least as correct as the artificial flavorings can get.
So your claim “experienced respected testers” was false.
That deserves that the upper post of yours should turn gray, imho.
Moreover, I don’t understand why you can’t accept that not everybody has the same sense of smell just like not everybody sees the same: notice people wear glases? Or people color blind? Can’t you accept to be “smell blind” if you are untrained or physically less capable?
The staring point must be that not every person is identical to you in any way.
IIRC the experiment tricked them by colouring the whites red and vice versa. So even if you could tell the difference you might not be so confident that you would know a trick was being played on you.
If that's what the experiment was, then it seems less evidence of people being able to taste the difference, and more evidence of how our visual perception might be able to mess with our sense of taste.
I've done (literally) blind taste testing. I could do it, because I knew what was being testing, but it was trickier than I anticipated. One member of my group got a couple guesses wrong. It's not such a ridiculous thing that even an expert (whose expectations have been betrayed by red food coloring in a white wine) might stumble.
It really depends on the wine as said earlier. I know pretty much nothing about wine and I could tell you the difference between a couple white wines because some are noticeably sweet (moscato, riesling) compared to others (sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio). I could id the first category vs the second, while somebody into wine presumably would have more depth.
The study you’re referencing on not being able to distinguish white and red wine was performed on undergraduate college students, not wine tasting experts.
I've posted later on down the thread, but I thought I might demystify some of this because it isn't as complicated as people tend to think. I'm not a great wine taster by any stretch of the imagination, but I understand the basics.
If your goal is to identify a particular wine, it's always going to be an educated guess. You'll be wrong a lot, but you can also be right a fair number of times. Generall, red wine is dramatically easier than white wine -- as you will understand later.
It's important to understand that the visual aspect of the wine is incredibly important, so it's not just the taste that helps you. First you need to figure out the varietal (or blend). If the wine is well known, then the varietal (along with a couple of other factors) will tell you where the wine is from: because in traditional wine growing countries, the varietals you are allowed to use are governed by the "appellation". For example, if you are going to make a "Burgundy" in the "Burgundy" region, you must use pinot noir. You have no other choice. If you choose to make a different variety, then you are spending millions on the land and making 1/10th the amount of money because you can't use the "Burgundy" name.
So, right from the get go, it seems like a bit of a cheat. Again, though, this is part of the game. Your host gives you a famous wine that you have a chance of identifying. If your host tries to deceive you (by intentionally picking
a wine that has a surprising profile, for instance), they will succeed. A good example of this might be to find a particularly good pinot noir from the US and watch as the expert mistakenly identifies it as a Burgundy. Sometimes that's fun and helps people remember that, yes, less famous regions make good wine too.
Anyway, different varietals have different colours and different smells and different mouth feels. Sometimes you can tell the varietal just by looking at it. Merlot is often down right purple, for example. Same with taste. For me young cabernet sauvignon has a flavour of leather. No other grape I've ever tasted has that flavour. Different grapes have different amounts of tannins and it's relatively easy to tell them apart.
It's not just the variety, but also to the wine making parameters. Most famous regions also specify how the wine is made. So if you figure out the varietal, you can then tell the difference between the regions just by how much oak flavour there is, etc.
Once you've figured out the variety and have an idea about the region, you need to look at the colour again. Wine oxidises over time. Natural corks allow a certain amount of air in the bottle. Even plastic corks have been developed to allow air into the bottle. Over time the wine turns brown. At the same time alcohol oxidises into esters, which usually have ripe fruit smells and flavours.
This will give you an idea of the age. Wine is interesting because high quality producers pride themselves on producing a variable product -- they make no attempt to homogenise their flavour profile from year to year (as opposed to low quality producers, which spend a lot of effort doing that). If the weather is hot and dry, then the wine will be dark, heavy and tannic. If the weather is cool and rainy, then the wine will be light in colour and the flavour correspondingly light.
Once you know the varietal, and have a guess on the region and age, it's a matter of knowing what the weather was like in each region. You search until you find a region/variety/year that is likely to match the wine. Again, I have to stress that if your host is intentionally trying to throw you a curve ball, they will almost certainly succeed in confusing you. It's not difficult to find a wine that tastes like it might be from a region at a specific time, but isn't.
Finally, there are some famous years in particular regions where the weather was awful, but that a handful of producers happened to escape the weather. In that case, if you have a nice example of a wine and you feel confident about the age, you might be able to identify the exact producer. There are other events like that, where an expert will be able to identify a producer. Again, it's really important to understand that this requires you to be super lucky, or more likely that your host is deliberately handing you the answer on a silver plate. They expect you to figure it out, and it's lots of fun for everyone if you do.
So that's it. Tasting food and drink is fun. Playing trivia games is fun. Playing trivia games in the form of tasting food and drink is fun. Don't try to find more than that, because there isn't any more. IMHO, anyway...
This is an excellent explanation. The blind red/white wine tasting study always comes up on HN as an example of wine all being the same. However, I love that study because it shows that preconceived notions have a huge impact on perception, but I don't think it actually shows that much about wine.
The differences to kinds of wines is not what’s being referred to. As you’ve also stated, the claim is that there’s no difference in the dollar value. A $10 Pinot is no different than a $100 Pinot. So, it’s just like the Strads.
This is not true, at least a$10 and $50 Chianti is very easy to taste the difference since the more expensive is stored longer and much 'easier' to drink.
Usually the difference from $50 to $150+ has a lot to do with aging too. You're essentially paying someone to store a high priced item for you for [x] years in appropriate conditions. Depending on your tastes and the wine it can be a huge difference whether or not its worth it.
There are also some pretty big differences in agricultural techniques applied to different wineries. The first growth Bordeaux guys are employing experienced growers at the top of their fields to consider things like harvest time, planting conditions, soil maintenance, etc., these costs do get passed along.
This isn't meant to be elitist or condescending in any way, but whenever I hear this comment it makes me sad. It makes me sad because it means the commenter has never had a truly good bottle of wine.
Most wine isn't that good actually. There is wide range of price / marketing / effort where the chances of getting a really enjoyable bottle of wine is more luck than anything.
But if you go towards the top of the market, there is a profound difference in quality.
If you ever want to know the truth, go buy a bottle of JL Chave Hermitage (the Syrah). There are some truly legendary vintages of this wine but in my experience you can pick any vintage and be blown away.
You can probably find it for as low as $2XX. I don't want to dox myself here, otherwise I'd offer to pick up the bill if the experience didn't change your mind.
Taste that wine and you'll know. It's an expensive habit and I rarely indulge myself, but "fine wine" is a real, if very rare, thing.
> But if you go towards the top of the market, there is a profound difference in quality.
Define "quality".
Wine taste, like most food, is both very subjective and very personalized.
I dislike most wines. Price doesn't matter. However, there are specific wines that I like very very much--if you put a right-bank wine in front of me, I'm probably going to like it--price also doesn't seem to matter unless it's very cheap.
What I would suggest to the original poster is that if you don't like a lot of wines, find a high-end wine tasting and go--the goal is simply to try to decrease your probability of encountering an actually bad wine. Try the different wines, and try to isolate which ones you like more and which ones you like less even if you dislike them all. Then you can go talk to the sommelier/buyer and give him some parameters in which to help you search.
Otherwise, "Find me a wine I like" is much like "My computer is broken. Fix it."--if you don't give someone any information to work with, they can't do anything to help you.
There is a big difference between being consistent with "This wine has a 92 rating and notes of <foo>, <bar>, <baz>" and "I don't like wines from syrah grapes."
What's a "92 rating" even supposed mean? From food: What good is a "92 rating" on a Peking Duck dish, for example, if you don't like duck?
The big problem is that "wine rating" has no relevance to me, the buyer, as to whether or not I'm going to like a wine. It took me years to figure out what the commonality was between wines I liked. If the wine industry figure out how to fix that, they'd probably sell a lot more wine.
Or, maybe they wouldn't, lots of areas already seem to produce wines that lots of people like for very reasonable prices.
Wine, at least to me and more with some grapes then others, tastes much better if stored for a few years in barrels. This is expensive and drives up the price a bit. But it is not the only thing that fine up the price so just because the price is higher doesn't mean it will be better.
OP didn't say there's no difference between wines or violins. Of course there is, but at some point those differences stop being noticeable to most and eventually to everyone. Research shows that at some point the story you are being told or tell yourself makes more of a difference than the product.
And while I am not a wine aficionado, I say this as someone who spends substantial amounts of money on up-market chocolates, port etc. which are not exceptions to this either.
> I'd be surprised if there was ever a period where blind testers could tell the difference.
If you read the study which OP summarizes, it claims to show that blind testers NOW definitely CAN tell the difference.
The best "new" violins of today are better than old strads, where "better" is defined as any of:
(1) objectively produces more sound volume for a given level of bow pressure as measured via a db meter at a specific location
(2) subjectively "projects better" (either alone or against an orchestra) as judged by listeners
(3) "is preferred" as judged by listeners.
The people judging in the tests for (2) and (3) have included the performers themselves, skilled listeners, and unskilled interested observers. The results seem to be really consistent - most listeners unambiguously judge the newer instruments better.
So no, it's not like wine tasting. At least, not anymore.
one key thing to keep in mind is that blind tests aren't the end all and be all. remember coke kept finding that people who drank coke preferred pepsi in a blind taste test. It turned out because Pepsi was sweater, but people's enjoyment of a beverage goes further than just sitting down taking a few sips of a drink.
Relying on data like that lead to one of the greatest follys in business history: New Coke. Many people when put on the spot get it wrong what they like, as they often focus on something very trivial. In coke, it was sweetness, and in these violins, loudness.
To me, its evidence the new ones sound better, but its not definitive.
Sort of related.. but I'd say classical composing. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Prokofiev, etc.
Where are the modern classical powerhouses? Contemporary classical is a scary, awful thing for my ears. The best I have found is actually in the movies - Danny Elfman and Hanz Zimmer, for instance. I sort of attribute them to modern Opera writers, though - they don't write full on symphonies.
I don't believe myself a snob, I listen to and enjoy modern metal, pop, techno. But I love the old classical as well. While techno and metal continue to progress and get better, classical has grown...weird
Many of of the great composers of yore wrote for operas, ballets, theater, and such which is the equivalent to movies today so I think that's an apt comparison.
That said much of the experimentation in classical music has been worked on and refined and yielded music which worked well later. For instance Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring sounded weird to the audience of the time, but we've come to accept it and many of its devices have been used to good effect (for instance by John Williams). One reason I think is audience have grown to accept and understand these sounds. Another reason I believe is the context. I think often we hear these together with a movie and it fits emotionally, but when we hear the music in isolation in a concert hall it we don't get it.
So, I think classical (and jazz and music in general) has always been weird and people have tried to push the boundaries and generally it's brought good results over time even though we may find it difficult to appreciate it right away or without the right context.
I think that's more of a cultural issue. Current "classical music" culture generates what I agree is pretty awful music. A lot of art forms end up like that: you have to digress from the norm to be relevant while staying within the lines to be part of the genre, and eventually you end up with garbage. Techno, and really most other modern genres have a lot more creative space left unexplored.
It's just like how it's hard to get too excited about modern art. It can either be derivative and boring or it can be outlandish trash, and nobody's giving awards to derivative and boring, so guess what you're going to see lots of.
> you have to digress from the norm to be relevant while staying within the lines to be part of the genre, and eventually you end up with garbage.
> nobody's giving awards to derivative and boring, so guess what you're going to see lots of.
I get what you are saying about incentives here (I think). But this may be too cynical and simplistic a way to look at pressures in art creation.
There are lots of artists simply trying to find their way and make new work that contributes to the ongoing development of their medium.
At one point harmony itself was frowned upon in Western music. Many of the great classical composers wrote music that was controversial at the time because of how they extended the use of harmony beyond the comfort level of the previous generation.
I'm not saying you have to like all the modern stuff, but it's possible to approach it with much less cynicism. Many of our favorite historical composers were pushing the medium in their day. We might have a bit of selection bias too in that it is mostly the music that became culturally accepted that we still have access to.
Lots of modern art and music doesn't land for me, but sometimes it really does and I'm grateful for it.
Orchestral music is a tough racket because it costs $50,000 to get an orchestra out of bed, and then you're competing against 200 years of great stuff that's in the public domain. I do think that soundtracks are where it's at for orchestral music. Music that's not simple pop had a shift from churches and courts to concert halls in the 1800s because that's where the money was, and now most people experience it in film or videogames for the same reason. Williams, Zimmer, Shore, and Elfman have all done great stuff.
I guess nobody said the classical symphony has to be a permanent style, or even the concert.
Despite that (notice that I am not an expert at all), Philip Glass has a number of what he calls symphonies. Not that I like them much but there they are.
Have you listened to John Taverner? They used some of his compositions (quite appropriately, to my taste) in "Children of men".
On the other hand, writing for the screen does not need to be "soft" or "less important". The same Philip glass has some (rather good, to my taste) impressive things in the Qatsi trilogy.
Religious composers are also rather good. Have you listened to Arvo Part? Or John Rutter's Requiem? Or James Macmillan? There is good stuff there.
At the same time, notice that Philip Glass may be a minimalist but his incidental music for "The Secret Agent" or the first piece of "Naqoyqatsi" are impressive works for strings.
You should listen to Johan de Meij, especially his "Lord of the Rings"-symphony and a piece for brass band called "Extreme Make-Over". If you have Spotify I recommend these recordings:
Re: Where are the modern classical powerhouses? Contemporary classical is a scary, awful thing for my ears.
Isn't that subjective? John Williams is quite popular, I would note. His soundtracks for Star Wars, ET, Indian Jones, etc. are well known, and catchy in my opinion.
Last weekend, the Oregon Symphony performed the score for Jurassic Park as the film played on a big screen above the orchestra. It was great fun. More than once, I caught myself thinking "this place has a really great sound system".
Pretty much any technology with planned obsolescence has older generations with better build quality including flip phones, household appliances, etc. That doesn't mean we're incapable of building to a better spec, we just choose not to for economic reasons.
Denim lovers often prefer fabric created by an old weaving machine.
Entire brands like Momotaro are known because they have been able to find and use these machines (that's even an issue for them since it is very hard to maintain these machines and it takes a while to train people).
Ironically, what is preferred are the irregularities created by the old process.
I think that someday it will be surpassed though.
Right now, a huge part of the process is still manual.
With more and more sensors in our smartphones, we already have more than enough to get a 3d scan of a body.
'All' we need is to automate tailoring and reproduce irregularities with modern machines.
There are objects of which we currently don't know how they were made, so the technique was lost. However, this also can be attributed to archeologists not being engineers.
I can think of examples along the lines of dead media formats. Floppy disks and instant film, for two examples. Floppy disks declined in quality and were extremely unreliable in the early 2000s. Floppy disks from the 90s and 80s were more reliable. Instant film has also declined in quality, with film from the Impossible Project (or Polaroid Originals) being inferior to Polaroid film from previous decades, despite being made with the same production equipment.
Much of that has to do with cost. By the early 2000s, floppy disks were much cheaper than they were in the 80s and 90s, and I'm guessing that was because manufacturers were optimizing for cost.
Those AOL disks that you could get for free and then reformat were clearly pretty cheap, and had a high failure rate.
The same thing is true with TVs made today - TVs are generally lower quality than ones made 20 years ago (in terms of reliability and durability), but are a lot cheaper.
If you target the higher end of the quality/cost curve, you will see an improvement in quality at the same cost (or even at a lower cost)
> If you target the higher end of the quality/cost curve, you will see an improvement in quality at the same cost (or even at a lower cost)
Neither floppy disks nor instant film exist at the higher end of the quality/cost curve, that's the problem.
There's also the issue of Baumol's cost disease. For labor intensive work, the cost will increase due to the increased productivity of completely different workers.
It's not always about the manufacturing. Sometimes it's about the materials used.
Brazilian rosewood is supposedly the best tonewood for the sides and backs of acoustic guitars but because the tree's are endangered you pretty much can't make a modern guitar out of it.
I remember a history teacher claiming that in the area of sculpture, the likes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo) haven't been surpassed. He could easily have been full of it, though.
With Roman concrete, you're talking about very recent discoveries in the grand scheme of things. Some of the important research is less than a year old.
Only to confirm and to raise some doubts in the skeptics, the good thing about Roman concrete is that is 2 thousands (or more) years old and still going strong and Damascus steel as well is 1 thousand (or more) years old and still fine.
What will become of modern concrete (if reinforced, I can tell you for sure it is going to rot) and what will happen with modern steel we will see in a few hundred years.
For the record, most of the structures built in the "gold age of steel", the second part of the 19th century, like railways bridges that were once considered to be "immortal" have been largely been demolished (and replaced with new structures) because the steel became too brittle and started cracking and the same, amplified or infuced by fatigue, affects a large number of modern steel bridges as well [1].
My dad swears by his viola which was made by an Italian shop that has spent a long time studying the techniques used by the old masters. For a long time Strads had an “indefinable quality”. Turns out research and experimentation is actually quite good at defining those qualities.
The role of the old 'genius-stradivari' violin is there to impress by its own history - not by it's sound.
Of course can the Stradivari be 3d scanned and analysed to death and be rebuit as an even better sounding facsimile, but that totally misses the point:
"The strength and longevity of Roman marine concrete is understood to benefit from a reaction of seawater with a mixture of volcanic ash ... The result is a candidate for "the most durable building material in human history." In contrast, modern concrete exposed to saltwater deteriorates within decades"
Easily? Sure, we have the equipment, but the hurdle is cost. It may be easier as far as human labor goes, but comparing the different social systems, it could be argued that it was easier for the Egyptians to build a pyramid. After all, who was going to argue with the Pharoh?
No blind or double-blind test has ever shown the Strads to be superior, although the tests can be hard on the violinist. The gold standard test had violinists wearing blindfolds and welding masks to be absolute certain they couldn’t see the instruments. Edit: when tested against modern instruments in the $30,000 range, which sounds like a lot but which is .1% the cost of a Strad.
I would beg to differ, it can actually be hard to impossible to acquire a taste. For instance, I much prefer exceedingly dark (>75%) chocolate. Whereas my partner cannot stand it, and forcing herself to eat it to acquire a taste would be a painful experience. It's possible that I could acquire a taste for Swiss chocolate, but I doubt it. From what I have sampled, it is far too sweet for my taste (although nowhere near the American chocolate)
I like how articles like this sometimes make it in the front page. Once I watched a documentary and for most old violins there is hardly anything original besides the main body (which projects the sound), pretty much everything else is renewed or modernized. The neck, pegs, bridge, etc.. for instance might have been entirely replaced on an old instrument. I found it interesting that that doesn't change the sound much.
"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."
Do the timbres of these instruments vary? It may be that "manufactured" instruments sound plain, boring, or untextured. Basically the same reason that modern production techniques make songs sound "better" but also worse in the sense that it sounds artificial.
The role of the old 'genius-stradivari' violin is to impress by its own history - not by its sound.
Of course can the Stradivari be 3d scanned and be analysed to death and be rebuit as an 'even better sounding' facsimile, but that totally misses the point:
When someone plays an 300 Year old instrument, the ooze of connotation to that history alone is enough to elevate the performance.
These instruments don't sound the way they did 300 years ago. It's reasonable to suspect the fetish surrounding older instruments results in far worse music while also preventing people from hearing what music actually sounded like 300 years ago.
I believe the parent was suggesting that by bringing about a heightened awareness and respect for the continuity of history of classical music embodied by the violin (heck, that very same piece being played may have been first played on that same violin, in some cases), it (can) elevate both the reception of the audience, and, more importantly, the confidence, acuity, and sheer weight of emotional expression in a performer, in a way that a known reproduction never could.
The same effects are widely known (and disparaged) in wine tasting and other aesthetic fields, but are in my opinion somewhat misinterpreted. To make the point explicit, imagine you've been told that a steak has been aged for 40 days. They bring you into a room, blindfolded, sit you in front of this steak, and they convince you to smell it. It smells like cooked meat, alright, but also different. It's tangy, complex, dare I say a bit fungal? you begin to salivate, take a bite, and as you begin to chew they take off the blindfold. The steak is green. Disgusting! That complex fungal note deepens, sours. You interpret the flavors as barely-concealed rot, and spit out the meat, overwhelmed by a wave of nausea. Then they change the lighting in the room, and you realize it was all a trick of the light: the steak looks normal, your appetite returns, and you finish it off.
On the other side, imagine you're the chef at this very uniquely lit restaurant - and you're handed two cuts of meat to prepare. One of them is beautiful, perfectly marbled, grass-fed, and expensive. The other looks similar, but you know that it's corn-fed, from a factory farm, and artificially dyed to match the color of the other. Which do you think is going to bring out the greatest performance in the chef?
It's not a 'fetish' - it's 'History'.
An old Stradivari Violin, 300 Years old, built by a near-genius-enginner, being played _Now_ is a much better experience than if they would use a 3d printed clone of it.
It's the original that contributes not only to sound but to the perception of the performance, because of the years that have gone by since the instruments first incarnation.
Of course, if you do it in a blind test, you aswell could simulate all the previously scanned stradivari properties, but that doesn't keep the original from being superior in idea - because it's the _original_.
YES, we can build quasi-stradivaris en masse now, but that doesn't keep the originals from being superior.
Therefore one of the main purposes of the Stradivari Violin is to show it, and announce it as such in a performance.
It's a historic thing with these instruments, not an engineering minmaxing thing.
I don't see any reason to limit yourself to imitation. Build a better violin and and you get a better violin. Imitate a Stradivari and you get something that sounds like a Stradivari, but does not improve upon the original.
How is that a reasonable suspicion? You think that no professional violinist has ever played a modern instrument? Has never made a comparison to a Stradivarius? The idea that music is "far worse" than it would have been if people were using modern violins is just laughable.
Ahh, but fashion is pervasive. When people assume something should be better they perceive it as better. Further modern instrument design is designed to appeal to people that are so influenced.
Thus, modern instruments also suffer from the same effect and we need blind evaluation to create more objective assessments across generations of musicians and instruments. Much like how hiding the musicians physical apreace changes how people rate them.
Right. Why play an acoustic instrument when we can accurately synthesize its sound, or use a tube amplifier when we could use a digital modelling amplifier that perfectly simulates it? Because nostalgia is one of the enjoyable aspects of music. That being said, one should realize that paying for nostalgia isn't necessarily paying for objectively better performance.
This talks quite a lot about the perception of the listener, but what about the player? The responsiveness of an instrument is one of those remarkable attributes that isn't often perceptible or appreciated by the audience -- the willingness of the instrument to respond to player input, which is part of the expressiveness. A performer can compensate for a "dull" instrument to a degree by anticipating a note and/or playing with greater force, but this has its limits.
It is very subjective, and I would think difficult to measure, but some instruments are truly magical and feel eager to perform. It can whisper or shout, or ring on certain phrases, or more easily leap wide note intervals without unattractive overtones. Others, ostensibly identical (even made with wood from the same tree), are lacking something and aren't as responsive.
Is there any way to rationally determine the value though? If we want to argue that the price should be determined rationally, then I suppose we could argue that all paintings are worthless. After all, why not just download a high resolution scan or a good print?
Yes, in my world, it would be pretty close to that. Maybe not completely worthless - but when you consider how much you pay for, say, an episode of your favorite show on netflix (which involved many writers, actors, directors, decorators, etc -- all of which may rightfully be considered "artists") you get closer to a more realistic perspective.
Btw, in that same world of mine, no actor would receive gazillion dollar compensation for a single movie, either, no matter how famous they were.
These studies have been going on since the creation of these violins. I read one where the violinists themselves couldn't tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a new high end model.
I do wonder, pushing aside the fakes, how much of the original wood is in each Strad. After a few centuries, there had to be repairs, hardware updates, new coatings, and so on.
So they didn't control for volume, and they didn't mention that the instruments are all well past peak sound now.
They're only going to sound worse as time passes, they've been getting worse for literally a century. We know that, and still we get, these articles, acting surprised.
It seems a bit pointless to run these tests, since it’s up to each violinist to choose his or her own favourite instrument. Their own studies show that top violinists can easily detect the differences between individual violins.
“The consistency of results from session to session showed that soloists could definitely distinguish one violin from another. However, the soloists seemed to prefer the new violins.”
"The consistency of results from session to session showed that soloists could definitely distinguish one violin from another. However, the soloists seemed to prefer the new violins, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their lists of favorites, new violins outnumber old ones roughly 3-to-2, and the most popular violin by far was a new one, denoted N5. Musicians rated qualities of new instruments higher, too. And when it came to telling old violins from new, the soloists did no better than if they had simply guessed."
This is unfairly downvoted.. top violinists have their favorite instruments for real reasons. This comment never mentioned anything about Stradivarius violins being better than modern ones.
> 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.
It is well known that equal loudness is crucial for nuanced A-B testing with sound and often a PITA to get right. (and vice versa, PR A-B tests of some audio "enhancers" or simply toggling the ones of your soundcard often use this trick and nodge up volume a bit with effects on)