By Brian Wise | From the September/October 2025 issue of Strings
In one time-honored category of string-themed YouTube videos, a violinist or cellist appears on camera with a handful of instruments at varying levels of price and prestige, from a centuries-old Italian masterpiece to a $75 Amazon special. A brief demonstration unfolds, and listeners are asked to “hear the difference” or otherwise guess which instrument is being played.
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There are few scientific pretenses, but viewer comments often run into the thousands, and the subtext is usually clear: to take aim at the longstanding assumption that instruments by Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, and other Italian masters are necessarily the finest ever made.
Face-offs pitting new against old violins have long predated YouTube, and some have been conducted with the rigors of science. One experiment continues to set the standard. In 2012, a team led by French acoustics researcher Claudia Fritz and American violin maker Joseph Curtin invited ten professional soloists to Paris to blind-test six new and six old violins, including five by Stradivari. Each instrument went through three 75-minute evaluation rounds—one held in a rehearsal room, another in a concert hall, and the third in the same hall with orchestral accompaniment and a small audience.
The violinists were asked to choose a violin to replace their own for a hypothetical concert tour. “Six of the ten soloists chose a new instrument,” Fritz and Curtin wrote in the study, which was published two years later in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “A single new violin was easily the most preferred of the twelve.” Quite decisively, the study disproved the claim that old Italian violins have unique playing qualities.
Predictably, the experiment touched off a barrage of press coverage, including comparisons to the famous “Judgment of Paris” wine showdown of 1976, a blind tasting in which upstart Californian wines were ranked ahead of their distinguished French rivals. But while the wine test helped invigorate California’s wine industry, no comparable boost was seen in the contemporary violin world. It raises a question: If new violins decisively win blind tests—as they have repeatedly over many decades—why do old Italian instruments still command lofty praise and prices in the millions of dollars?
Top-Dollar Antiques
Looking back on the study, Fritz remains adamant that 300-year-old Italian violins are not intrinsically superior musical tools. But she is not surprised that market values have not fallen. She compares acquiring a $12 million Stradivari to buying a Picasso. “The reason people pay a million dollars for a Picasso is they want the real thing, even if with a copy you would not notice the difference,” she says from her office at the Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Institute in Paris. “If it makes people happy to own the original [Strad] and pay $12 million, that’s their problem. But what’s important for me is that people don’t believe that this actually plays well.” Or at least that the instrument’s age and price tag don’t guarantee the instrument will play significantly better than a modern instrument.
Fritz is less understanding of the persistent rhetoric around old instruments. She hears about Paris concert presenters pressuring soloists to play on old Italian violins, even though the musicians insist that they are more comfortable with their own instruments. Artists’ bios and promotional literature also give undue weight to old Italians. “What makes me more frustrated is when I still see on [printed] programs that this person plays this or that violin, because we don’t care. You would not hear a difference anyway.”
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Curtin also doesn’t believe the lofty prices of old Italian instruments conflict with the study’s findings. “There’s no conflict in saying that new cars generally work better than old cars and yet classic cars can be vastly more expensive,” he says in a call from his studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Old violins are priced as collector’s antiques, although not all musicians see them this way. No professional driver would enter a vintage car in a Formula One race, but soloists regularly play Strads with modern orchestras and expect them to measure up.
But Curtin is pleased with the study’s impact and says it has helped “steer scientific research away from a perennially fruitless search for the secrets of Stradivari. I may be wrong, of course, but I’d be surprised if any future research will overturn our basic findings.”
Debate over Curtin and Fritz’s findings came not just from players of old Italians, indignant at seeing their icons dethroned. Writing in Nature in 2017, the British science writer Philip Ball argued that the study overlooked the power of perception. He noted that in actual concert conditions, violinists and audiences are not blind to the instruments being played. “If people think that a Stradivari sounds sweeter, that needn’t be a delusion that acoustic science should undermine,” he wrote. “Such psychological factors are known to influence perception, just as a wine might taste finer if you’re told it is a vintage.”
Fritz finds herself exasperated by such claims. “People will always argue that science cannot capture the complexity of a human being, and you cannot capture what it is to play a Strad,” she says. “Actually, we do capture it. We perfectly understood what happened: It’s a placebo. If you want to pay $12 million for a placebo, that’s up to you. If people think they are playing well and with more pleasure, then good for them.”
Consistent Results
Other observers agree that hype over old Italian instruments has persisted despite all contrary evidence. Two-hundred years of blind testing has produced remarkably consistent results in favor of new instruments, argues Emily Dolan, a musicologist at Brown University, in the essay compendium, Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality. “Indeed, I have yet to find a test in which an old Italian won out over a newly-made instrument,” she writes. But attitudes are entrenched. “We find that the continual success of new violins in these experiments does not ultimately upend the value or desirability of older instruments.”
One of the earliest experiments that Dolan documents took place in 1817, when a guitar-shaped violin by François Chanot was played in alternation with a Stradivari for an expert committee listening in an adjacent room. The panel judged Chanot’s violin to be at least as good as the Strad, but that was not enough to ensure its long-term success, and it was soon regarded as a mere novelty instrument.
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The early 20th century yielded a series of violin face-offs, many explicitly intended to unsettle the soaring prices commanded by old Italians. The French newspaper Le Monde organized several of these, including one in which new violins by Belgian and French makers took first and second place, and old Italians took third and fourth.
Other blind tests were conducted in the 1990s. In a 1994 experiment at MIT, the Tokyo String Quartet played bits of chamber works on four sets of instruments, three of them made by modern American luthiers and the fourth by old Italian masters. When polled, “many” audience members said they preferred the sounds of the modern instruments, according to a New York Times report, “several of which seemed tonally richer, better acoustically balanced, and distinctly louder than their Renaissance counterparts.”
The Desire for Projection
The key question of projection was studied by Fritz and Curtin, who found that players favored the new instruments for both under-the-ear loudness and projection into a hall. They also rated the new instruments’ timbres as equal to or better than the old, upending a long-held belief that loudness comes at the expense of tonal quality.
When it comes to competitions or auditions, players may feel pressured to use an old violin when a modern one may serve them better, says Curtin. “When people are auditioning for jobs—especially if it’s for concertmaster—a violin that projects well in the hall makes so much difference,” he says. “In the violin competitions I’ve attended, I’ve been struck by how poorly served many of the players are by the instruments they are using. You could mount a convincing case for changing the culture around these events.”
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Curtin, who is known for using non-traditional materials and designs in his own instruments, is encouraged by what he sees as a greater cooperation between scientists, musicians, and luthiers. Journals increasingly cite his and Fritz’s research when looking to examine the chemistry of old violins. “The good thing about having our papers in a respected journal is that responsible journalists are more likely to cite them,” he says.
But there is still a large market pinned on the presumptive advantages of old instruments, and dealers and appraisers did not respond to queries about the study’s market impact. Jason Price, founder of Tarisio Fine Instruments and Bows, writes in an email that the binary debates over better/worse or winner/loser miss the point, “and we end up talking in circles, trying to be objective about things that are, by nature, not.” He adds that there’s no need to try to prove the superiority of an instrument. “You’d never see a ‘scientific test’ to determine if Basquiat is better than Botticelli, or Rembrandt is better than Richter. We should celebrate all violins, both old and new.”
Fritz’s current research includes a study exploring the potential differences in sound between Stradivari and Guarneri violins. But she is not out to persuade any skeptics. “People who don’t want to believe will never believe the scientific evidence,” she says. “I’m not doing the research to convince anyone. I think it’s like many other things. You have plenty of scientific evidence for climate change, for example, and still nothing changes.”
She adds that if people buy an old Italian instrument thinking they’ve acquired the greatest musical tool, “Then there is a problem. But if they want to pay for it to acknowledge that Stradivari is kind of the father of contemporary violin making, and has been able to make instruments that survived three centuries and wars and are in amazing condition, then why not? That’s not up to me to judge.”
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