[cpayne]

My wife is a professional violinist. (In Australia at least) if you've watched the news or a recent Australia movie, you would have heard her play.

She says you can ALWAYS tell the difference. But she also says, "better" depends on the music. If you are playing a song on X-Factor or Australian Idol or even Christmas carols, then you'll never notice. If you are playing a solo for a classical piece (wedding or other ceremony), then it certainly sounds "different".

Better is debatable, but different, yes

[iheartmemcache]

Eh, I'm going to question her ability to identify the difference between a Strad and non-Strad based on this double blind study[1]. There's a lot of fetishism in the community on the Strad, probably to the joy of Christie's auctioneers worldwide. "The old growth trees in the region can't be sourced anymore". "no, it's the varnish. Your resonance is affected by both the chemical composition of the mix as well as the way it aged with the wood".

I'd imagine if 5 of the best sawyers with 5 of the best luthiers and sound engineers in the world all sat down together with the goal of replicating the Strad's sound with 100% accuracy I'm confident the 'unique' sound of the Strad could be replicated. It might take a lot of time and maybe a few hundred k in equipment (a dozen condenser mics placed strategically at a variety of places within the room and near the instrument itself, some vibration analysis equipment on the equipment, etc), but eventually the sawyer will choose the right wood, the engineer would perform acoustic analysis and tell the luthier "ok, that 43 micron chisel shave you just took just did __, 22 more and we match the F# perfectly on the G string".

I think it's very similar to the whole audiophile thing, where at least some of it is placebo. Those $30 monster cables aren't transmitting with any more signal fidelity than your $5 ones (assuming equal gauge copper, proper ohmic termination, blah blah), and I can sit down and prove it to anyone with $400 worth of spec-ans from the 1980s.

Now the "different" vs "better" -- I love my record player but when audiophiles say 'it sounds better' than the raw mix-down digital masters, in terms of the amount of audible audio content objectively this isn't the case. (Edit: See [4]) It sounds different from what you're used to. You like the 'warmth' that a belt drive record through a 1950s speaker produces. You like the hisses and crackles and pops. It's an emotional connection you have. When I was playing guitar with my crappy band, I'd run my digital content through a Tascam quarter inch tape deck just to get that hiss in the tracks before we sent it down for mastering (we didn't have those fancy plug-ins to do it for us then).

The same thing happened with film.[2] TV is generally shot at 30fps, film at 24fps[3]. When the FPS rate increased with the advent of more modern technology and higher sampling rates, people would claim that cinema didn't look 'cinematic'. The motion blur of the analog film experience we grew up with (well, those of us over 25) is something we mentally associated with the experience of going to the cinema. You saw a bunch of people comment on this with the Hobbit being distributed and shown at theatres at 48 FPS. "It just doesn't look right".

--

[1]http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell...

[2] I'm sorry I don't have a source on this study, but the phenomenon was pretty widespread. Cinema isn't something I've delved too far into but the cinematographer forums have thousands (literally) of threads on FPS discussion.

[3] That's just historically how things broke down -- 24 was a convenient number to match up with actual seconds due to it's easy factorability, so you could get half a second at 12 frames, a quarter at 6, etc. This made it easy back in the day when post-processing involved actually involving cutting nitrate-based film and sound syncing to the video involved physically matching the snap of the clapper on your audio track to the visual of the actual frame of when the hinge closed.

RE: 30 fps, I'm not sure, but I'd guess it had to do with the fact that we're at 60 hertz in the US so you could interlace half a frame a cycle (ie. trigger on the peak of every AC cycle to update the set of horizontal lines modulo two, so the electron gun presumably only had to hit half the lines within that time constraint) Other parts of the world operate at 50hz, which is why I'd imagine you have the PAL standard and 25 fps in those locales. (Pure speculation though, someone who's knows for sure, jump in.)

[4] Operating under the assumption that that they were pressed from the same master source.. I'm limited only to the records I bought which were from bands with too small of a budget to afford two separate masters. (I.e., That mid-90s emo 200 run EP by Knapsack didn't have two masters, hell on tour they were lucky to have a floor to crash on.) Still, poster beneath me makes a very valid point that should be taken into consideration (Though I'm sure you're already aware of whether or not the band had a separate master DAT/master plate made if you like the band enough to care about the nuanced differences between two masters.)

[cc439]

>I love my record player but when audiophiles say 'it sounds better' than the raw mix-down digital masters, in terms of the amount of audible audio content objectively this isn't the case. It sounds different from what you're used to.

There is a case to be made that CERTAIN albums will produce an objectively better sound in several respects when compared to the CD/digital version of the master. This is an effect of the "Loudness Wars" that began in the late 80's and still continues, albeit at a lower intensity, today.

The analog nature of the vinyl format places a hard limit on how "hot" one could make the sound by tweaking/compressing the dynamic range. Eventually the mastering would exceed the physical ability of the needle to track the groove which is obviously untenable for everyone involved. CD's on the other hand, can push the range as far as acoustically possible and people who want their new rock album to really ROCK are going to be more impressed by a master that somehow sounds louder than any other album at a given volume setting. Thus, the Loudness Wars began and have progressed to the point where the dynamic range has been pushed into the realm of guaranteed acoustic clipping because it still sounds louder and the loss of fidelity won't matter when the song is blasted from an iPhone speaker.

Obviously, this is an effect limited to specific albums. Even if you buy one a pressing of one of these albums, you aren't guaranteed better sound as the vinyl boom has led to some really half-ass remasters that can be as half-assed as passing the borked digital master through conversion software to ensure it works without making any further effort.

Aside from this one outlier scenario, a song/album/whatever mastered attentively to the CD format will always deliver objectively better sound quality.

Source: http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...

[elektronaut]

Spot on. Mastering for a wider dynamic range on vinyl makes sense. Not only because of the inherent physical limitations, but it's also reasonable to expect the listener has a decent sound system to go with the record player. It's also common for level to vary between records. Wider grooves allow for more loudness, so it's a tradeoff versus running time and playback speed.

Fortunately, the shift from CDs to digital as primary target has brought an end to the Loudness War. The various services have standards for perceived loudness, so there's no incentive for the mastering engineer to squeeze a few extra decibels out of the mix - past a certain point you're accomplishing nothing but killing your headroom margin.

[analog31]

I'd imagine if 5 of the best sawyers with 5 of the best luthiers and sound engineers in the world all sat down together with the goal of replicating the Strad's sound with 100% accuracy I'm confident the 'unique' sound of the Strad could be replicated. It'd might take a lot of time and maybe a few hundred k in equipment (a dozen condensor mics placed strategically at a variety of places within the room and near the instrument itself, some vibration analysis equipment on the equipment, etc), but eventually the sawyer will choose the right wood, the engineer would identify "ok, that 43 micron chisel shave you just took just did __, 22 more and we match the F# perfectly on the G string".

Indeed, the behavior of violins has been the subject of intensive study for decades. Every new technique for measuring sound or vibration is applied to violins. There's an article every few years about some new secret discovered in the great fiddles. Good acoustic measurement gear is now more sensitive than human hearing. It was only a matter of time before somebody cracked the code.

An amusing rumor is that the tone of a violin changes over time, due to age and playing, and that the Strads are in decline.

[iheartmemcache]

To be fair, a violin's tone does change over time especially with playing. Take the cylinders in your car. Every time that piston moves up and down, it wears away a little bit at the cylinder rings and a little bit on the cylinder walls. Particulate masses may collect in the bore. If you're running diesel, there are micro-cavitations literally eroding away the inner-bore of that cylinder. Air filters might get dirty, fuel lines clogged, manifolds warped, hydraulic pressure in your break calipers will vary. All of these ultimately effecting why your car handles differently than when it came out of the factory.

The same thing is true for the fingerboard, the bridge, the strings and other components you interface with (or are interfaced with from things with which you interface) on your violin. As the oils on your finger on the strings/fingerboard gradually acts as basically a mini-abrasive tool, the fingerboard itself will change shape (you can see this easily in the wear patterns). The pressure variance from the string's depression, the shifts in temperature/humidity in the ambient environment (which will stress the wood in all sorts of ways, both in an elastic (temporary) as well as a plastic (permanent) manner), all of these micro-variables add up over time, just like with your car.

[analog31]

Another effect is that our hands and ears change over time. I'm not sure I'd be capable of conducting an objective before-after test of my instrument over the seven years that I've owned it. My technique has changed, I've changed the strings, my bow is due to be re-haired, etc. And my ears are seven years older.

[dcsommer]

The study in [1] has a sample size of 10 in Paris, in one setting. I'd hardly call that conclusive or ruling out all the possible confounding variables.

[ubernostrum]

Also known as "I am convinced this false thing is true, and will selectively demand higher levels of rigor from anything opposing my view than I ever have from anything supporting my view".

I've read quite a bit about the blind violin studies, and don't see a way to dismiss it -- people were claiming instantly recognizable, impossible-to-miss massive differences in quality for the older violins. Yet nobody has been able to back up those claims with results; all results so far indicate that when the age and maker are obscured, identification by sound alone is no better than chance.

[dcsommer]

Personally, I do tend to think the difference is much harder to distinguish than tradition would dictate. These studies are evidence in that direction, in fact. But simply sampling 10 people is about as good as 10 anecdotes.

> Also known as ...

Please. What I've just written makes the rest of that sentence silly. There is no need to jump to conclusions.

[owenversteeg]

I agree with your point, and to make it worse some of those 10 people were from a previous, discredited study by the same authors.

Funny enough two comments I made - on this thread, now dead - went from +2 to -4 very quickly. Another comment went from +5 to +2.

I've got a pretty strong feeling that people love telling this anecdote about "science over art!" and ironically don't like it when it turns out the science is actually bad science. As a result, they're banding together and simply mass-downvoting things.

There's an interesting debate to be had here, on the merits of the sounds of different instruments, and the linked NYT article is fascinating. Unfortunately, people seem to be caught up in a frenzy of linking bad science to each other instead of actually discussing violins, which are a personal passion of mine.

I went into more detail on the bad science in my other comment here, which is going negative now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977

[ubernostrum]

Unfortunately what it's going to take is a Randi-style "tell me, die-hard believer, the conditions under which you would accept a conclusion of not being able to tell the difference, and we'll set it up" experiment. And really it will take one per die-hard believer.

But the simple fact is that the die-hards are going to, well, die hard. The result with violins is not at all suspect; it's very much in line with results from other fields where particular products are touted as easily distinguishable due to their inherently much-higher quality. See fine wines for another example.

[Pyxl101]

> But simply sampling 10 people is about as good as 10 anecdotes.

That is not generally true. It depends on what kind of statistical assumptions you make, or statistical analysis you conduct. The term statistical power describes our chance of correctly detecting an effect when there is one to observe. If the effect is small, then a larger number of samples are required to achieve a given level of statistical power, whereas if the effect is large, then fewer are required.

I recommend that you consider the question: if 10 samples are not enough, then what specific number of samples is enough? How do you decide? Fortunately, these questions have been studied in the field of statistics.

Let me give you an example. Let's say I told you that you will flip a coin in the air, and when the coin reaches its peak height, I will shout "heads" or "tails". What would you make of it if we ran this experiment 10 times, and I correctly guessed the outcome 10 out of 10 times? Perhaps you would conclude I really can predict coin flips. By comparison, if I called the outcome accurately only 5 out of 10 times, then you'd probably consider my claim false.

But, consider these two possibilities: (1) what are the odds that my guesses are really no better than random chance, and I've just guessed 10 out of 10 correctly by good luck? (2) What if I really am accurate 99% of the time, but I guessed only 5 out of 10 correctly by bad luck? Statistics allows us to evaluate how likely these things are.

If I'm doing the math correctly, then you'd expect someone to guess 10 out of 10 coins correctly just by chance once in every ~1000 experiments. So to see this happen is not witnessing an extraordinarily improbable event; run enough experiments of 10 coin flips and you will see it.

If someone truly has 99% accuracy, then in almost every experiment they will guess 10 out of 10 correctly. They should guess all 10 correctly 90% of the time. A person who is truly 99% accurate will only guess 5 out of 10 flips correctly once every in every 10,000,000,000 experiments. So it is extraordinarily unlikely that you will see someone with 99% accuracy guessing 5 out of 10 coin flips correctly. It can still happen just by chance, but it's really improbable.

Bringing this all back to the main topic, it is possible for a result of 10 data points to count as convincing evidence against the theory that there is a strong effect, such as that musicians are 99% accurate in discerning the type of violin, while it may be inadequate to evaluate whether there is a weak but still-present effect, such as 51% accuracy. Whether the number of samples is good enough depends on how small of an effect you want to measure, and how confident you want to be in your assessment.

A free book is available online called "Statistical Inference for Everyone" which introduces these topics. https://github.com/bblais/Statistical-Inference-for-Everyone

[Steko]

I don't doubt the study that much but I think the point everyone misses in their contrarian zeal to say 'Strads are nothing special' is that there has been enormous progress in instrument construction in the last 30 years and the actual takeaway from "3 cherry picked $30-40K new violins equal/beat Strads in double blind study funded by new violin maker" is not that 'Strad's are garbage' but perhaps that 'new top of the line violins are effing great'.

[flukus]

Unless there is a better study then this is still a big step up over personal anecdotes.

It's also quite common for humans to think the can tell the difference but can't under test lab conditions. We see the same results in everything from wine tasting to telepathy.

[cpayne]

>Eh, I'm going to question her ability to identify the difference between a Strad and non-Strad based on this double blind study

lol! That is a brave statement. As @dcsommer said, sample size is tiny.

When you audition for an Opera (well, her auditions anyway...) were always done blind - ie behind a curtain or similar.

When you practice and play at that level, you notice the little things. Same way I can look at C++ source code, or Java, C#, Objective-C or Node.js. I have to stop and think to explain how I know it is C#. I just know.

Again, I didn't say one is better than an other. Just different...

[nerdponx]

FWIW I think the issue with higher FPS is that it requires different camera work and acting styles for it to be convincing.

[Chinjut]

Why would acting styles have to adapt to the frames per second? And how?

[ahakki]

I'm not sure about acting style, but FPS has an influence on shutter speed, which is usually set to half the shutter speed (eg. 1/48s for 24fps). This changes the amout of motion blur in the image.

[geebee]

That's an interesting observation. I'm an amateur violin player, but as I've started looking at middle tier instruments, I've already noticed that more expensive doesn't necessarily mean "better." Here's the thing, that doesn't mean the money goes nowhere, it just means it isn't measurably better, but it may mean more specialized and tailored to a particular set of acoustic priorities.

There is, of course, some correlation between more expensive and better, I'm more talking about what happens once you've gotten away from the cheap mass produced instruments and even the decent but unremarkable student violins. Once you get up into a higher level, instruments may get expensive because you need a highly skilled craftsperson to bring out particular qualities in an instrument that may match up to what a musician needs. That sort of thing can't really be mass produced, and because it requires a lot of attention and construction time from a skilled person, it's expensive too.

This holds true for a lot of things. For instance, what's actually "better", dinner at the french laundry, or a damn good burrito. The burrito actually isn't cheaper because it tastes worse, it's cheaper because it isn't as expensive to produce. This actually holds for a lot of things out there.

More expensive isn't always "better", but interestingly, just because it isn't quantifiably better doesn't mean you aren't getting something for your money when you spend more, either. Sometimes more expensive means high quality and specifically tailored for a particular set of criteria.