Interesting! I play violin, and mine happens to be pretty old (made in the late-1800s). Granted, I had a VERY different price range ($1,000 to $2,500), so those state-of-the-art new ones weren't even an option for me.

...taking part in a test like this would pretty much be my dream come true. A friend of mine let me play her $50,000 violin once, and someone could have shot me in the head immediately after, and I'd have died happy.

This is hilarious. I suspect that much the same can be said of guitars. I can't tell you how many times I've heard guitar players go on and on about how old guitars and amps are inherently better. And then you see what they're playing and it's an old Les Paul Junior or something with a scratchy volume pot, a pickup that's shot, a body that's been broken and glued back together, a warped neck, and all of the tuners and the bridge and nut have all been replaced with new parts not matching the originial style.

Now don't get me wrong: Some old guitars are works of art in and of themselves, as well as being valuable historical artifacts. Who wouldn't want a georgous flame-maple '57 Les Paul Standard with PAF pickups and all of the original equipment, in factory-new shape? I would certainly cherish one. But would it actually play or sound better than, say, a new Parker? That doesn't necessarily follow.

This is not all that new. Jascha Heifetz played cheap stuff for his audiences frequently.

There is a reason there is more than one guitar company, and a throng of luthiers to fit them to the artist.

Doesn't surprise me at all.
Just this week, I was introducing an old favorite game to some friends. " It's a 40 year old game that was 30 years ahead of it's time."

A violin, or any musical instrument, is a tool, and the skill of the operator of the tool determines how it sounds. I've observed this first-hand for my whole life as my 97-year-old father has been playing the violin for 91 of those years including stints in the Chicago Symphony and a number of Academy Awards orchestras. He's played the same Carl Becker violin for the last 80 years. I was the chosen son to play the violin (and I had to be concertmaster or the belt came out) and I always wanted to use his violin instead of the cheapie he made me play. Several times he used my violin for performances instead of his and said, "Did you hear anyone complain about the tone? You are the only one who does." My dad never had Strad envy as he was hired a few times (for private performance at the guy's house) by a wealthy guy who owned a Strad but couldn't play. I was with him when he did these and each time, even though he enjoyed the Strad, he was smiling when he got in the car as we both knew that his Becker had better tone than that Strad.

If you want to see the violin as a tool I recommend you view "The Red Violin" movie starring Samuel Jackson.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120802/

Thank confirmation bias for the people who keep insisting "old brand X" (really of anything) is better than "new brand X" and are "willing to prove it". They get some other version of whatever they are using and it will sound/work the same or better and sit and insist they they conclusively proven that their old thing is better while the rest sit and scratch their heads because it wasn't.

Thank confirmation bias for the people who keep insisting "old brand X" (really of anything) is better than "new brand X" and are "willing to prove it". They get some other version of whatever they are using and it will sound/work the same or better and sit and insist they they conclusively proven that their old thing is better while the rest sit and scratch their heads because it wasn't. -- NakkiNyan at April 9, 2014 2:44 PM

The problem with that argument is that it isn't true, so many times, especially on the first pass of software.

Just look at the adoption rates for Windows Vista and Windows 8. Why do you think there are so many companies still using Windows XP as their primary OS?

Years ago my company used PeopleSoft 8 for accounting software. PeopleSoft 9 went to a web based format that would have been internal to the company. It would have been a great idea if we used the rest of their suite. They didn't develop the interface so that the end user could load in files that came from external systems. So we would have had to load the client on the end-user machines even when they had the web interface.

Then even getting into something as mundane as a car. Have you seen that most cars have gone to idiot lights instead of gauges? Gauges give someone a chance to look at what is going on with the car and maybe look ahead that the temp is getting too high. The idiot light comes on and tells you that you've killed the engine. No true notice.

So I don't buy the newer is better argument without a true evaluation.

I don't think the bias towards the old violins is a case of snobbery or confirmation bias. I think that ten years ago, this same test would have yielded different results. That's because manufacturing practices, particularly in the field of violin making, have made unbelievable progress lately. They're using a lot of computer modeling to accurately mimic the old masterpieces. It's pretty damned cool if you ask me.

What WD said.

…Especially since the subject's preferred instrument was described as "a new violin with a little more down-to-Earth price tag of $30,000."

$30K is serious money for any instrument in any genre. That instrument is almost certainly one of the computer-modeled ones WD is discussing.

At the height of the financial bubble, musicians were paying up to a hundred k for flat head Gibson banjos made in the early thirties.
The appeal was mostly because that was what Earl Scruggs played.
We have been in a luthier renaissance for the last 15 years in this country.
A better banjo than any of these old Gibsons can be had for under 5k.

Earl has been dead for a couple of years now, and I suspect, that with him, went a lot of the value of the pre war Gibson banjos.

Most times I can hear a difference in the sound, but it is a individual preference, that is driven by anticipation, and familiarity, not a difference in quality that can be quantified.

A great deal of it has to do with the set up of a particular instrument, which, with a banjo makes a big difference in the sound.

Computer-modeled was the wrong wording; more like microprocessor-lathed.

> A friend of mine let me play her $50,000
> violin once, and someone could have shot
> me in the head immediately after, and I'd
> have died happy.

Tell us more.

(About violins, not suicide.)

Would your brother-in-law have heard the difference?

Well, it is true that newer is not automatically better. But there are things that color our opinions. Obviously simple nostalgia is one. But another thing is that restorers are just so damned good at their job these days. When you see an old car that has been restored at a car show, you're probably looking at a state of restoration that is actually substantially better than when the car rolled out of the factory. This is especially true for any American car built between about 1960 and 1985, the time period when all of the Detroit automakers were having substantial quality problems and most cars were shipped to the dealer needing additional work done before they could be sold.

I'm old enough to remember when you could figure on your TV set (hardly anybody had more than one) going out about once a year. If you were unlucky, the problem would be something like needing a new flyback transformer that would have to be ordered, and the TV repairman would have to haul it to his shop to do the work, and then you'd be without television for two weeks. People would scream bloody murder if that were still the situation today.

Reminds me of this 2006 article in The Seattle Weekly:
Wine Snob Scandal

After appropriate statistical massaging, Brochet's results prove that a lot of what wine connoisseurs say about wine is humbug: A side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers.

What Brochet's study demonstrates is that science has so far illuminated little about how our brains turn experience into knowledge, and that if we're not careful, attentive, and ever suspicious of our certainties, the evidence of our senses can't begin to compete with the expectations planted in our conscious minds (often, without our noticing it, by others). It's much the same lesson taught by UW psych prof Elizabeth Loftus' studies of how "eyewitnesses" can remember events they never saw: Words and concepts and expectations trump perception every time...

"It's much the same lesson taught by UW psych prof Elizabeth Loftus' studies of how "eyewitnesses" can remember events they never saw: Words and concepts and expectations trump perception every time..."

Quite so, and it's amazing what windows it can open to the psyche. For instance, it's a truism in aircraft accident investigation that you can always find a witness who will say, no matter what the circumstances of the crash, that the airplane was on fire before it crashed.