Million-Dollar Strads Fall to Modern Violins in Blind ‘Sound Check’
2nd April 2018
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.